But all those parentheses!

I know it sounds like a lame reason to dislike a language, but I've always found staring at Lisp to be so much more difficult and distracting than C-style syntax.

    printf("Hello world");

Lisp mode, move left parenthesis, remove semicolon

    (printf "Hello world")

Second round

    if (var == 2) {
      do_something1 ();
    } else {
      do_something2 ();
    }

Lisp mode, move left parenthesis, remove semicolon and curly brackets

    (if (= var 2)
        (do_something1)
        (do_something2)
    )

On a big source file I am not sure if the amount of parenthesis is bigger than parenthesis , bracket, curly brackets and semicolons counted together.

Did you try coding in it for more than a week? I have found that using a properly indenting editor (Emacs, drracket) the parents just fade away.

And then you discover paredit and you start wishing every other language would let you treat your source code like that.

Yes. I was required to use Lisp for intro comp sci in College, followed by all the AI courses in Lisp, then a few jobs.

It's just never been a go to language for me.

Sounds fair. Most of the time people say "i don't like the parens" the closest they came to actually using a lisp was JavaScript.

From experience of pairing with other people, there are those happy to leave indentation and formatting to their linter/IDE and those who are anal enough to do it all manually.

The latter group tend to find lisp not that painful because lisp parens/s-exps are as explicit as you can get, and indentation makes parens almost invisible

There was an attempt to deal with that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language)

Also, Julia was syntactic and/or semantic sugar on top of femtolisp. Got converted to it in first pass with LISP's power doing the rest. Here's Stefan Karpinski on that:

"So ultimately the reasons for Femtolisp are:

1. Scheme is excellent for writing parsers since trees (aka S-expressions) are its forte.

2. Femtolisp is a small, simple, highly embeddable and remarkably fast Scheme.

3. We control it (and by "we" I mean Jeff) and can fix any bugs we encounter."

Yep, No 1 are those godawful parentheses and s-expressions making the job easier. ;)

Use Emacs and take advantage of its electric indent.

Parens are not syntax to me. Syntax is that ADA thought ' meant string indexing.

What parentheses?