What people never seem to bring up is that C has just as many parenthesis; they're just not adjacent quite as often.

(do something to these (and these)) vs. do(something, to, these, and(these))

In any case, you really do things with whitespace, so none of it matters.

That's a good point. A lot of it is just what we're used to.

With the C-style syntax, it's even worse because you have all the curly braces and semicolons. I just converted a bunch of javascript code to Outlet and it's a bit more concise even though it's exactly the same code.