I agree with your priorities on how long term concerns trump up-front discomfort when learning a language. But to me it would be of long term benefit to never s

I agree with your priorities on how long term concerns trump up-front discomfort when learning a language. But to me it would be of long term benefit to never see parens that could be otherwise indicated by sig whitespace patterns like the empty/foo/bar indented block we have above. The elegance seems to come from having a simpler parser, and one less thing to explain to people when they're learning the lanuage. As a user of a language and not a developer of a parser, the first doesn't concern me and the second should be trumped by long-term concerns. Using significant whitespace to eliminate syntax is elegant in its own way as well. Again, maybe this is just because I'm not a lisper, but keeping implicit parens that follow a well-established pattern should be a trivial mental task for a developer. Could you provide a piece of lisp code as a contra example?