> Most (but not all) people who have used lisp for significant projects find that they either like the parens or are simply neutral about them.
There's a substantial selection bias there in that people who have strongly negative feelings about parens have plenty of opportunities in the field to work with languages without them, so the only people likely to put up with them on significant projects are ones who feel positively, neutrally, or perhaps only weakly negatively about the feature from the start.
That said, I do think the complaints about that particular feature are overblown, much the way those about Python's particular whitespace handling are.
I think this is related to the fact that our own internal parsers that have been trained upon c-style code falls about when trying to read list code. So the dislike is not due to the number of parenthesis, but rather our own internal discord when trying to apply our existing mental parsers.
The only way to get around this is to spend enough time using the language so that you can build a new mental parser.
There's a substantial selection bias there in that people who have strongly negative feelings about parens have plenty of opportunities in the field to work with languages without them, so the only people likely to put up with them on significant projects are ones who feel positively, neutrally, or perhaps only weakly negatively about the feature from the start.
That said, I do think the complaints about that particular feature are overblown, much the way those about Python's particular whitespace handling are.