> Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird.

Not me. I used C before Lisp, and Pascal before that. C replaced syntax like BEGIN and END and "END " with just { }. I thought this was a most excellent thing.

I was still not using Lisp when HTML and then XML came along. My reaction to XML was this: since most of the content of XML is payload data, why don't we just fscking use parentheses or braces to structure it? Some {foo bar {baz}} or whatever instead of this moronic, bandwidth-wasting, unreadable nonsense ....

I could understand it when the markup is just a few raisins in the pudding like:

> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod

but this XML thing made no sense as a data notation in which every little leaf element is wrapped in verbiage.

So then when I got into Lisp, it basically had the syntax I already wanted; it was "pre-approved".

I already liked parentheses because they occur in English prose (like this), in mathematics, and in almost every programming language I had ever used.

The Unix shell and other command languages eliminate the commas: we don't write

   tar, czvf, foo.tar.gz, foo

Moreover, command arguments are not restricted to narrow lexical categories like "must begin with letter or underscore ..."; they are just clumps of non-whitespace characters. If you know any command languages, what Lisp is doing in that regard is obvious; you're not confused by a+b just being an argument, different from a + b.

Commands with the main function on the left followed by space-separated arguments occur in parentheses in POSIX command substitution syntax:

  printf "[%s]\n" "$(cat file1 file2)" > file3

  dironly=$(basename $(dirname a/b/c))

In general, by the time I got into Lisp I had written so many scanners and parsers, solved so many shift-reduce and reduce-reduce conflicts and whatnot, I knew a good thing when I saw it.