I think there is an over-emphasis on the parens in Lisp. Yes, they are vital, obviously, but the real magic for me is that it's consistent all the way down. The

I think there is an over-emphasis on the parens in Lisp. Yes, they are vital, obviously, but the real magic for me is that it's consistent all the way down. The prefix notation is incredibly powerful once you get a hang of it. Consider this in Python (or any other language): a = [1, 2, 3] Now sort it. In lisp, everything is: (function [arg] ....) You've conquered the entire syntax of the language. Now we can move on to getting things done and not have to worry about order of operations, variations on the basic syntax, and so on. You can do newline type formatting with paredit and sane indentation habits, which aren't any different than other languages.