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What's interesting is that for me Clojure was my first lisp. One of the main reasons I never learned lisp before Clojure was all the parens that made the language impossible to read. Clojure cleans up the "normal" lisp syntax quite a bit, and that made it a lot more palatable.

Beauty is in the eye, and all that, but CL code still makes me want to claw my eyes out.

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People complain about the parens in Lisp but what kills me about Lisp in general is not the parens but the fact your brains has to read the code from bottom to top and/or right to left. This is because of prefix notation.

And while I do not like object oriented languages its far more natural to English readers such as myself to write and read things from top to bottom and left to write.

Now of course some FP languages have operators to (Haskell, F#) to allow left to right function application and you could of course make macros in Lisp in whole it doesn't really fix the problem entirely.

You can also of course mitigate the above with judicious use of let expressions but more often than not people inline anyway.

Dim the parens in your editor. It helps if you're not used to them already.

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