Comment by kazinator

People complaining about Lisp parentheses mainly just trolling, not actually working with any kind of Lisp dialect at all.

Traditional Lisps are not functional, but multi-paradigm.

Working with lists is functional though, in that operations that build larger lists out of smaller lists or atoms return a value that you must capture. You don't create an empty list with a persistent identity, which you treat as a bag. New programmers are encouraged to write "pure Lisp", which is a term that denotes list manipulation which treats cons cells as immutable (or any other objects you happen to be using, but mainly those).

Javascript treats character strings similarly the way traditional pure Lisp treats lists. You cannot mutate an existing string to add characters to it, but perform arithmetic on strings to produce new strings. Yet that doesn't prevent the adoption of Javascript. People are cheerfully doing text processing in Javascript in website after website after web application.

The most popular Lisp currently is supposedly Clojure and it is much more doggedly functional than traditional Lisps like Scheme and Common Lisp.

Nope; the parentheses thing is just pure trolling by mainly non-users.

Anyone who actually uses some kind of Lisp could easily write comments that target true weaknesses.

I suspect there is a group out there who has genuine problems with the parentheses, due to cognitive problems like dyslexia and ADHD and whatever. However, I don't see how they can do well with any programming language syntax. Show me what you do use, and how far you've gone with it before I can take you seriously about the parentheses.