Ah, the good old S-expression flamewar again! Every few years it comes up. This is, of course, mostly a matter of opinion and experience, but I find S-expressi

Ah, the good old S-expression flamewar again! Every few years it comes up. This is, of course, mostly a matter of opinion and experience, but I find S-expressions highly readable and LISP syntax superior in readability to every other syntax I've seen, as long as different parentheses are allowed like in all modern LISP dialects. There are two other problems with LISP. First, it's so powerful that the semantics gets too rich, every author creates a DSL of its own with tons of macros and functions for every data structure. That makes code unreadable and difficult to maintain in the long run. At some point, every LISP program starts to look like a hack and you start spending most of your time transforming one data structure to another to interface with various packages. The second problem is the focus on dynamic typing. I've found strictly static compilation better for debugging. Racket is particularly bad in that respect, as it tends to use ad hoc symbols with contracts everywhere. Static enumeration types are just way better for that purpose. Ideally, they should even be tied to the functions they are used in (e.g. a "function parameter type" with appropriate scoping). These are the main drawbacks of LISP, maintainability and readability of code written by others is too low, because of a tendency to encourage hacks and DSLs.