The abstract syntax was intended to be used writing programs until designers could get around to creating a concrete syntax with human-readable punctuation (ins

The abstract syntax was intended to be used writing programs until designers could get around to creating a concrete syntax with human-readable punctuation (instead of Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses), but programmers soon got used to programming directly in abstract syntax. Perhaps it was, but.. 1) The nature of research is so that you can't always predict in which way your invention will be useful. To me and many others it seems lisp syntax is quite handy. 2) If we take Clojure for the sake of example, we'd see that it comes with some neat macros which are important part of the language. Those can be viewed as mentioned concrete syntax elements built upon the abstract syntax. Punctuation's been improved as well.