Good points. Perhaps the problem is also how lisp is taught? When I learned lisp, the procedural aspects of lisp were shown, but with the understanding that t

Good points. Perhaps the problem is also how lisp is taught? When I learned lisp, the procedural aspects of lisp were shown, but with the understanding that they were bad, and not to be used. Probably because it was shown as a functional language, and was meant to be used as such. Similar to how, say, c++'s functional programming capabilities aren't really taught. If the indentation is sufficient, why not just remove the parens completely and rely on indentation? Lisp does have an advantage in being regular, which might not be worth giving up, and Algol descendants are kind of a mishmash, to be fair. To be honest, I'm not enough of a lisp user to be able to know what a good solution is for this one. Maybe changing some function names would be useful.. for example 'add' is better than '+', which I read as 'plus'. Repurposing infix symbols as prefix symbols seems problematic. If I were redesigning the language, one of the more important things I'd change is the keywords and builtins. For example, head and tail seem a lot better to me than car and cdr. A lot of lisp's keywords and functions come from math, and I'd probably change them to reflect mainstream algorithm design instead.