There is an IDE-based solution! It's called Paredit and can be combined with something like SLIME. (All this for Emacs, of course, but Emacs has all the capabil

There is an IDE-based solution! It's called Paredit and can be combined with something like SLIME. (All this for Emacs, of course, but Emacs has all the capabilities of an IDE, especially for Lisp.) After a while of using paredit, I actually grew to rather like the parentheses. At the very least, it lets me edit in a slightly more semantic fashion: I can navigate, select and modify code based on its structure because the structure is defined by the parentheses. That said, I actually do prefer not having nearly as many parentheses, which is why I like ML-style syntaxes. Especially Haskell. Idiomatic Haskell is very light on parentheses and braces and brackets--it's a surprisingly minimalistic syntax. I love it.