> If the person justifying Lisp doesn't mind that the word 'cons' is terrible, why should I trust their aesthetic sense about anything? This is not about aesth

> If the person justifying Lisp doesn't mind that the word 'cons' is terrible, why should I trust their aesthetic sense about anything? This is not about aesthetics, unless you are arguing that the symbols should be replaced by square brackets or emoji. And this has been tried before. S-Expressions are not the only way to express lisp. There are M-Expressions and many other notations. Even significant whitespace has been tried. And yet people keep coming back to parentheses. Don't you think there is a reason for that? Also: almost all other languages use the exact same convention for lists that Lisp uses (except they tend to use square brackets as their symbol).