This is what we see: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tarsius/paren-face/master/...

Don't look at the parens and don't stop at the superficial look :]

In most cases, an imperative example in a curly-bracket language (JavaScript as one example) has the same number of parens and curly brackets as a Lisp has in parens. They're just in different places.

And, the non-Lisp languages tend to have more rat droppings => , ; . etc.

f is a function which takes two arguments, adds them, and returns the result.

Clojure: (def my-var ["hello" 123 (f 10 20)]) -> my-var: ["hello" 123 30]

([""()]) -> 8 noisy characters

JavaScript: const my_var = ["hello", 123, f(10, 20)]; -> myVar: ["hello", 123, 30]

=["",,(,)]; -> 11 noisy characters

Obviously this difference becomes more pronounced with longer argument lists or array element counts.

For me much of the appeal of the syntax comes from using it with a editor integrated REPL, or when writing macros, or when generating linter configuration from a domain model etc.

However I agree with you on some level. Lisp code can easily be written in a way that’s hard to read. Specifically because of nesting expression way more often than is comfortable for me to read. I much rather prefer let bindings and threading so most of the code reads from left to right.

>To each their own. There are obviously very smart people choosing Lisp so I’m not trying to knock it down or anything, I just never got the appeal

Just know that almost no one STARTS off by liking Lisp-Syntax, but oh boy does it grow on you.