Please stop spreading nonsense. The syntax that may be a bit unfamiliar to uninitiated stops being an issue within literally hours. It takes a few days to completely become comfortable with it. I have seen people learning Clojure as their first language, I've seen people coming from other languages. But I have never met anyone who actually wrote Clojure for a few months and still couldn't get used to the syntax. Only people who are completely unfamiliar with the language do sometimes complain about the syntax. Because again - to uninitiated it doesn't look very familiar. Just like indo-arabian numerals looked strange to Europeans in 13th century.
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The syntax of lisp is objectively bad from a UX perspective since it doesn't properly separate different kinds of objects. Our brains are very good at parsing symbols and very bad at parsing text, and lisp forces you to parse text to understand the structure of the code. That is great for computers to parse and generate since the structure is uniform, which makes lisp great for meta-programming, but it also makes it a horrible language for humans.
Any language which PL enthusiasts considers elegant since you can do so much with few abstractions will be a really bad language in practice since humans prefers different kinds of code to have different syntax and look different.
>The syntax of lisp is objectively bad from a UX perspective since it doesn't properly separate different kinds of objects.
I still don't understand what kind of objects you're talking about and why they need to be separated? Why pencil.writeOn(paper) is a good UX and (pencil.write-on paper) is a bad UX?
> Our brains are very good at parsing symbols
Are you saying we should be all using APL? Point me to a single academic source where it says "from neuroscientific point Lisp syntax is not so good for humans". For the same reasons why Sanskrit writings would not be very easy for me to read, Lisp is not very easy to read to some people. And the reason is - unfamiliarity. But does that mean that written Sanskrit is a bad UX or it can't convey information or used effectively as a language? I will state again: I have never met a single person who after writing Clojure for a few months would still complain about its syntax. Not saying they don't exist, I just have never met any. Besides - after writing Lisp for a few years I find it a bit difficult for myself to read code in other languages - Python, Javascript, C, Rust, etc. And I have been programming in non-lispy languages for over twenty years. I also personally know a few programmers who started with Clojure as their very first PL and then later tried to learn another, more traditional language and they all have struggled. It took time for them to adjust to new, unfamiliar syntax. ALL of them said that they prefer Clojure syntax.
> and lisp forces you to parse text to understand the structure of the code
How is Python, Javascript or even SQL are different? You still have to mentally parse the text to understand structure of the code
> Any language which PL enthusiasts considers elegant since you can do so much with few abstractions will be a really bad language in practice
That is why Lisp refuses to die? When Fortran is forgotten, COBOL completely dead, C replaced with Rust and Java with Scala and Kotlin, PHP gone and Ruby becomes unpopular, there still will be at least a few dialects of Lisp still very much alive and thriving.
Take Emacs for example. For decades different IDEs and Text editors been trying to "kill" Emacs, yet it still thriving and still being used and packages written in emacs-lisp are in abundance and new ones being developed all the time. Check Github stats for different languages - you will be surprised of how much emacs-lisp is published on Github alone.
"Really bad language in practice" turns out to be very pragmatic choice, otherwise how would you explain that Clojure been successfully used at companies like Apple and Walmart, at NASA and many other https://clojure.org/community/success_stories. There are multinational companies like Funding Circle that have built their businesses on Clojure.
Many seasoned CS veterans repeat over and over: "Learn Lisp if you want to master the art of programming".
So if you don't get Lisp syntax - it's just you. You aren't used to it, it's unfamiliar, that's all. But there's nothing inherently "bad" about it.
You caught me. I'll stop spreading nonsense.