Lissssp – lotss and lotss of ssilly parethesises! We hates it! – Quoted by memory from comp.lang.lisp years ago. (Sorry, can’t remember by who.) Really, I get

Lissssp – lotss and lotss of ssilly parethesises! We hates it! – Quoted by memory from comp.lang.lisp years ago. (Sorry, can’t remember by who.) Really, I get the parenthesis hating: It is truly terrible to have to deal with them unless you have good editor support and have learned to use it. But then a funny thing happens: The parentheses essentially vanish! You just don’t read parentheses anymore, you read the indentation instead. In my own emacs setup, I have in fact chosen to de-emphasize the parentheses to the point where they are barely visible. It makes the code so much more readable. Good editor support means at least semi-automatic indentation of code. Unindented code is of course unreadable, and wrongly indented code is worse. But that is true of any programming language, isn’t it?