There is no serious debate. Earth is generally believed to be round (and there is no swarm of articles floating around that explain that the Earth is, indeed, r

There is no serious debate. Earth is generally believed to be round (and there is no swarm of articles floating around that explain that the Earth is, indeed, round/flat albeit in some weird corners of the Internet). And LISP syntax is generally not believed to be objectively superior (again, albeit in some weird corners of the Internet) ― even TFA shies from saying that, and most of its arguments are inherently subjective. I know why the parentheses are there and yet, despite the article's claim that "once you understand their value, you’ll likely never be able to program without them", I am perfectly fine programming without them. Well, maybe I am just not a True Programmer then. Oh, and "the solution is to learn to stop worrying and love the parentheses" is not even an argument, just as the immediate knee-jerk response "well, fuck you too I guess" to this ludicrous proposal is not an argument either. The criterion of truth is practice. In practice (of the last sixty years), human programmers have generally fared better with non-LISP syntax, like it or not. Sure, if you love the parentheses, go and use them but don't try to pass you personal preference as the objective truth. It's the similar thing with the literate programming: yes, it works great for Knuth, but it doesn't work well at all for most of the other people who are not Knuth. And by the way, if you drop parentheses and reverse the order of the words, you basically get a FORTH program which is self-delimited and requires no parentheses. So parentheses hit that middle point between the two extremes of "many special pieces of syntax for structuring the program" and "no special syntax for structuring at all" and take the worst from both of them: they are redundant for the machine and they don't help the human programmer ("humans can’t immediately parse structure with a glance"), so all they do is just increase visual clutter. Thanks no thanks.