I understand the reaction, but some people feel just as negatively about parentheses as lispers feel positively. If I can feel positively about a language purely because of the parens, it's no sillier to feel negatively for the same reason.
I actually agree with that entirely, and the point of my jest was just to say that we should look deeper for the important ideas, not refuse to read the book because we don't like the color of the cover.
Lispers don't feel positive about Lisp because of parentheses; change them to curly braces or brackets or ^ and $—that's really not what matters. Lisps with brackets go all the way back to the beginning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression). Indentation-based Lisps have been done too (https://readable.sourceforge.io/).
The point is an expression-based syntax that directly models the code tree, is written in the data structures of language, and is convenient for meta-programming. It's a fundamentally different approach that yields massive benefits (see my other comment in the thread if you want to hear that spelled out in more detail).
But we don't see that when we just stop at unfamiliar syntax.
Lispers have been structurally-editing code as a matter of course since at least 1970. Most of the rest of the world only got a taste of that when tree-sitter came out circa 2018 (I know I'm rounding the edges here, but the point stands). Half a century later! Why is that? It's not just curly braces vs parens—something deeper is happening here.
I do apologize if I came off rude. I'm just so frustrated at hearing this same line year after year after year from people who are missing out some of the most powerful ideas in programming because they prefer this ASCII glyph over that one. It's nothing more than parochialism.
It just makes me want to scream (perhaps uncharitably) "surely you're not a serious engineer who works on serious problems if your biggest concern while coding is which character is used to group code?!" I want tools to help me think more clearly, ways to operate at higher levels of abstraction, better concurrency semantics—surface characteristics be damned. Sure, I have my preferences about orthography, but the tail doesn't wag the dog.
Look deeper! Learn what each language has to teach you! Then keep the parts that move our craft forward and use whatever glyphs you want. But don't reject the automobile because it doesn't have handlebars.
Moreover, the things that look familiar probably have the least to teach you.
I believe we have the ability to do so much better as an industry, but it's not going to happen if we reject the unfamiliar just for being so.
