A lisp program will tend to have fewer parentheses than an equivalent Java program has parens + braces. They just stack up at the end of the expression. For e

A lisp program will tend to have fewer parentheses than an equivalent Java program has parens + braces. They just stack up at the end of the expression. For example, see https://gist.github.com/coding4food/1248505 https://gist.github.com/coding4food/1248505 Part of this is because lisp tends to be more concise, so there are fewer expressions required. There are relatively few places where lisp adds parentheses, rather than just moving them - mostly just basic operator expressions: (+ a b) vs a + b. Adding parens (a + b) doesn't make it any harder to read. For function calls, Algol-descended languages already use parentheses and prefix notation, they just put the parens around the arguments instead of the whole expression: (function argument list) vs function(argument, list)