They are ugly, I agree. Personally, I prefer lisp (especially Clojure) syntax, but not many people agree with me there.

What's actually sad (I learned this quite recently) is that the inventor of Lisp wanted to include a mechanism to evaluate formulas along the lines of FORTRAN. Something like:

(math "x = sin(a) * b ^ 2")

Lack of something like that turned me away from Lisp (LISP at the time) a (cough) long time ago, since I didn't like the impedance mismatch between Lisp code and math for numerics.

At any rate, Julia looks like a fine general purpose language, I'm going to see if I can contribute somehow. I'm hopeful that GC pauses can be avoided for large classes of Julia programs, but we'll see...

Throughout Lisp history, this has been done.

(Let's not count things like computer algebra systems written in Lisp that have some sort of actual math notation for input and output, just alternative syntax for programming in Lisp itself.)

As early as 1973, there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGOL

That can actually be made to work today: http://abcl-dev.blogspot.com/2010/04/cgol-on-abcl.html