The verbosity of Lisp is one of its biggest draws for me. It means that I can easily read and understand what's going on in a program I've never seen before, o

The verbosity of Lisp is one of its biggest draws for me. It means that I can easily read and understand what's going on in a program I've never seen before, or in my own programs after I've been away from them for a while. This is doubly important for me, as I jump between programming languages a lot. In other, more terse languages, getting back up to speed is a lot harder for me, as they use a lot of shorthand that I forget after being away from them for a while, but with Lisp spelling things out by default, reading it is a lot easier for me. This increased readability also makes for much easier management of complexity. I can build on a readable foundation to make a more readable larger program as well. At the opposite side of verbosity you find the terseness of regular expressions and conventions favoring the one or two character variable names and operators of languages like Haskell (not to mention various esoteric languages deliberately designed to be difficult to program in). I can understand the appeal of this sort of compression, and sometimes it's useful for little programs, but for me they tend to lead to a write-only style that's too high a price to pay unless I'm doing nothing but programming in that one terse language constantly so I never forget what all that line noise means. I generally value simplicity, clarity and spelling out exactly what one means over terseness and cleverness, and that's a big reason why I prefer Lisp (and especially Scheme, which is the simplest and most elegant Lisp dialect that I know of). As for parenthesis, they make it a lot easier to reason about what's going on in the program. Instead of the language forcing the programmer to do the work of figuring out what expressions apply to what, in Lisp it's clearly spelled out for you so you know exactly what's going on by the parenthesis. It just makes programs a lot clearer, and it also makes the implementation of other language and editor features easier, as it removes a lot of ambiguity in the code.