Its ironic because foo() and (foo) have the same number of characters; but the later is actually data you can manipulate directly.

Reminds me of the blub paradox in beating the averages[1].

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/avg.html

I once had a comment where I translated a clojure function into it's equivalent syntax in python. It was still pretty hard to read. I think its about how lisp uses function composition for everything makes code hard to parse until you get good at it. Even with the standard practice is to hide it with macros and many small functions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174946#11177360

I like more forward-building, pipe style FP. Reading outwards on the statement level still makes things hard for me.