> I have no idea why it hasn't caught on.

Because there is no parenthesis problem; there's a newb problem. The people who complain about parenthesis haven't used a Lisp long enough, that's all. Parens are a feature, not a problem, and everyone eventually figures that out and stops complaining or they move on to a language more suited to them.

It hasn't caught on is because for all the talk about parens, they aren't really a decisive barrier, just an easy thing to latch on to, and because S-expressions are more clear (note that more algol-inspired M-expressions were the original proposed programming syntax for Lisp, with S-expressions as an behind-the-scenes representation, but programmers preferred using S-expressions directly.)

(we) lispers LOVE our parentheses.

"Elegant weapons... for a more civilized age."

Ref: https://xkcd.com/297/

I love that particular xkcd

I'm not even a lisper.

Perhaps because significant white space (e.g. Python) has quite a lot of detractors of its own.

I absolutely cannot stand significant whitespace... it is a step back in almost every area of usability.

Why?

I have done two major (commercial) software projects in Python, with a good amount of code, several months of work, and I've never had ANY kind of problem with the indentation/whitespace.

Any Python IDE (like Pycharm) will easily highlight you where each section of code sits relative to the indentation level, so it's really pretty simple. Really, really simple.

In your opinion. For you it's a step back. For some of us it's very easy to read and write.

I don't really get this line of thought... are curly braces really that hard to read and get in the way of things to you?

I love both Lisp & Python. I'm not sure about large projects, but to me, nothing is easier to read than Python and a lot of people agree. It is so strict and authoritarian that nearly everyone ends up writing similar code. Good for sharing scripts on my team. If I write Perl, only I can understand it...and even that is temporary lol (I joke, but you get the point).

If you love Lisp & Python try Hy (hylang.org).

This is a much more approachable syntax, reads much like a mix of Ruby and Python