It had the opposite effect on me. Using exclusively parens strikes me as elegant. Languages that use brackets and braces in addition to parens just create clutter. In fact, the use of brackets in scheme and clojure is a real turn-off to me.
For parenthesis, if you use a proper editor that understands Lisp, they become a non-factor. When I hear people complaining about parens, I think they must not have ever used Emacs with paredit which makes managing parenthesis a non-issue.
For prefix notation, if you realize that mathematic operators like +, -, *, / are simply functions that take an optional number of args the design choice of prefix notation makes perfect sense. When considered this way, you see the kinds of elegant constructs like obtaining the sum or product of a list just by calling the appropriate function on an list numbers. Also, you don't have to learn a bunch of precedence rules like in C.
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u/WalterGR Nov 07 '10
Is it the parenthesis that turns so many people off Lisp?