> Lisp because of all of the parens and the sometimes "backwards" dataflow of nested functions. I've come to believe that the second part of this statement rea

> Lisp because of all of the parens and the sometimes "backwards" dataflow of nested functions. I've come to believe that the second part of this statement really is the primary reason why Lisp drives some people absolutely nuts. The parens are really just a distraction and "easy" justification for not liking the language. It makes sense, though. When you have to read both "outside in" and "bottom up", a lot of your acquired reading abilities (left to right, top to bottom) are in tension with the code you're trying to understand. At least in Clojure, the ->> family of operators ("threading" macros) are doing a good job helping to alleviate this. Maybe they're available in other Lisps, I don't know. EDIT: found a reference to these macros in Emacs Lisp: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ThreadMacroFromClojure http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ThreadMacroFromClojure