There have been many attempts to solve the approachability problem by creating alternate syntaxes. Vaughan Pratt's CGOL, written almost 40 years ago, was perha

There have been many attempts to solve the approachability problem by creating alternate syntaxes. Vaughan Pratt's CGOL, written almost 40 years ago, was perhaps one of the best. Although these alternate syntaxes may be helpful to newcomers, they have never caught on. Expert users actually prefer the parenthesized form; so anyone working in Lisp for very long has to learn to deal with it -- and usually, once they do, they find it preferable. You said it yourself: programmers preferred S-expressions, so they became the default. The other important point here is that the non-Lispers are right, in a sense: editing Lisp without a paren-counting editor is just as tedious as one would expect. But with a paren-counting editor -- and even better, with something like Paredit that keeps the parens balanced at all times -- editing actually becomes easier, more fluid, and more pleasant than in other languages. That is why expert Lisp users prefer the parens.