I don't get all the love for lisp. In my lisp experience I remember being in debugging hell trying to count out between 18 and 19 close-parentheses to add some parameter I'd forgotten. Bad memories.
Why do the parentheses always come up? E.g. Crockford advocating Javascript: "You get lambdas without having to balance all those parens." But balancing all those parens is easier than balancing all those parens, curly braces, square brackets, commas, and semicolons that one is used to in other languages (again, assuming a decent editor). This is so obvious to me that I wonder whether the parenthesis business is a stand-in for other things that people really don't like about Lisp. It's harder to pin those other things down so people single out Lisp's most visibly distinctive feature - parentheses - instead. (This has the bonus of being instantly convincing to the ignorant.)
I'm not saying people should like Lisp, or that if they're intelligent enough and give it enough of a try, they will like it. I know at least two brilliant programmers who meet those criteria and don't like Lisp. (Interestingly, both favor Smalltalk.) I don't know of anyone who's quite gotten to the root of why.
There is probably no perfect language, and every one has its good and bad sides - it would be great to hear more about the bad sides of lisp. Simply because the arguments are never heard. I'm assuming that there are bad sides of course :-)
Sussman has a sort of rythym when he closes parens. It was definitely a moment for me when I sort of recognised myself doing it.
I think once you have written enough functions in Lisp or Scheme, it becomes ingrained, that you sort of parens-match whilst reading back through the function.
I've only written a few thousand lines, so it doesn't take that much practice. Obviously you sort of need a real project to even make a dent in picking up a language.
Still, 18-19 close parens sounds excessive. The source for ourdoings.com has 1 place with 9 close parens in a row, 4 places with 8, and 7 with 7. That's in 13KLOC.