One thing to consider is that s-expressions make implementing paredit easy. It takes an enormous amount of effort (e.g., libclang in C++) to get close to that w

One thing to consider is that s-expressions make implementing paredit easy. It takes an enormous amount of effort (e.g., libclang in C++) to get close to that without s-expressions. It's as if you think of programming languages as "fixed", and we only get to choose which kinds of tools we develop, but another way of doing it would be to design programming languages in ways that specifically make developing such tools easier. Then s-expressions could well be the go-to solution for that.