In fact, the syntax of s-expressions is the key to Lisp's power. The form of program and data are the same, which allows the powerful macro facility and the functions read and eval.

I've wondered for years why people latch onto the parenthesis thing. When I learned lisp for a class, I never gave it a second's thought. To me it feels like people are looking for a handy reason to put Lisp down, perhaps either because they don't understand it or because they do understand it and they are jealous of some of the features of Lisp.

When people say they hate "parentheses" in Lisp, I'm pretty sure what they really mean is "I hate s-expressions." You may find them natural to work with, but it's pretty clear most programmers do not. Witness the crazy amount of work compiler writers put into writing parsers that could be trivially done away with if they just switched to using s-expressions.

Personally I prefer both Forth's RPN and C/C++ (Algol?) style notation to Lisp's s-expressions.

S-expressions are neither wonderful nor terrible. They are just A Decision. Certainly you can have bad syntaxes and good syntaxes, as well.

From my perspective, it comes from being used to parentheses in English. Specifically, you have a man thought, then you have some other modifiers that may expand on that concept which you enclose in parentheses. This fits well with C style functions, for example. But with Lisp, the main thought (the function name) is also enclosed in parentheses along with all its modifiers, which makes it a bit harder to follow the code.

However, I do like the overall elegance that this brings to the code, where code and data are the same. Which is why I also like Postscript -- it does the same thing but in an RPN style (a function is actually an executable array).