> The parens are the shadow cast by Lisp's consistency, which is the reason to wish for Lisp in the first place.

Beautiful. I'm stealing that, with your permission?

<beginExasperation> I don't understand how people who everywhere else love minimalism, refuse to give up the unnecessary parens (whitespace suffices). If the advice is not to look at them, and they are not needed, why have them at all! Every lisp program begins with a syntax error! That doesn't cause alarm bells to go off in people's heads? The commenter above says because parens-less lisp has been tried for 60 years and hasn't caught on it's evidence that it won't work. Sixty years is a blink! Binary notation is 330 years old. Indian numerals about 1,000 years old. Lisp is still in its infancy and things can be improved. </endExasperation>

- cranky new lisper

I get that, but I can't help but view them as visual noise.