Here's a good wiki on the topic:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LispLacksVisualCues
After a brief period of usage 'the parens disappear' and you just read the code by indentation.
Re:The Lisp Curse (2011)
by marssaxman on Thursday February 25, 2016 @07:23PM
(#11178989)
So, uhh... why not use a notation where nesting is expressed via indentation, then? I don't understand how the syntax can be considered superior if the way people actually cope with it is to hide another syntax inside it.
I was dumping ASTs as part of a little language project recently and my first impulse was to render them as S-expressions. Alas, it just wasn't readable; I couldn't make any sense of it. Indented YAML style lists, though? The structure pops right out and the information I wanted was immediately obvious. There were no constraints here, I was free to render text in any way that suited me; the Lisp style syntax just wasn't helpful.
It's like going from Arabic numerals to counting by groups of five; initially, it feels like you're losing expressive power. And, of course, at a glance, you can't read "|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||" as quickly as you can "28".