The claim that learning how to read and write s-expressions is hard might well be a "made up thing". (I agree with you, I think anyone, if they sat down for a d

The claim that learning how to read and write s-expressions is hard might well be a "made up thing". (I agree with you, I think anyone, if they sat down for a day and really applied themselves to it, would get it.) On the other hand, I think you'd agree, the fact that people have strong, negative, emotional reactions to s-expressions when they first encounter them is absolutely not made up. We could sit here and grumble about how silly it is that people cannot overcome such an irrational response (indeed I often do), but that won't change the fact that people have these responses. If we did that, we'd be doing the same thing that GUI designers did in the 90's. "Why, the widget for $x is right here. Any reasonable user will RTFM, know that $x can be checked there, and behave perfectly rationally." (And it happened just so, as decreed from developer's rolling chair, right?) Of course, we know now how misguided this is as a method for UX design: all users are in a sense irrational, and systems need redundant strategies for saving the user from themselves. The similarity here is that we cannot will away intellectual blemishes in users, we can only accommodate them. That is Lisp's challenge if it is ever to get big. For GUI's, the solution was to take seriously users' need for visually attractive interfaces, redundant display of information, and guardrails/handholding for actions commensurate with their risk, to name a few strategies. For Lisp, it's hard to know what might be the right approach. As klibertp writes in a sibling comment, maybe the solution needs to come from outside the language itself.