Lisp doesn't have more grouping characters than other languages. The primary difference is that it consistently uses prefix notation, so the cursor always imme

Lisp doesn't have more grouping characters than other languages. The primary difference is that it consistently uses prefix notation, so the cursor always immediately goes inside the parens, rather than needing to type one part of an expression (the function name) outside of it first. That's what modes like paredit help with. Programmers in languages like Ruby (optional parens for method calls) and Tcl (no parens for proc calls) might agree with you! Why does virtually every language require parens, when they're not needed? At least with Lisp, they serve a necessary purpose. Another one: almost every language uses commas to separate items in a list, including function arguments. In the vast majority of cases, the commas are useless. Lisp doesn't use commas to separate elements (though Clojure allows them if that's your druthers). Why can't I say f(x y) or [3 4 5] in, say, Python? There's nothing else it could possibly mean.