lots of people complain about Lisp syntax -- they find it too weird and verbose, they call LISP "Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses"; and sometimes they even pop up with proposals to "fix Lisp" on comp.lang.lisp -- "Lisp is sort of cool, but this syntax... let me show you my great ideas." on the other hand, most lispers (and I among them) actually love s-expression syntax. who is right here? are syntax preferences a subjective thing, or one can decide which is better quite in an (more-or-less) objective way? or, perhaps, that's just a matter of taste and custom? i've got a good example today.. i'm using Parenscript -- cool Common Lisp library that automatically generates JavaScript from Lisp-like syntax -- and i've wrote a function that caches document.getElementById results (that makes sence for dumb browsers like IE): (defun my-element-by-id (cache id) (return (or (slot-value cache id) (setf (slot-value cache