I have a suspicion that 99.999% of people who say that Lisp syntax is difficult to read haven't really tried to use it (outside of a random homework assignment in CS101).

The syntax is incredibly trivial, and needs very little initial instruction (except to tell newbs to stop trying to put the close-paren on a line by itself, like they are fresh out of a JavaScript boot camp and have no frame to conceive anything else, and that, really, the automatic indentation and the shapes should be at least as readable once you try to use it in real-world examples, and see how that works in practice).

> Since Lisp puts the function name after the opening parenthesis, there is more distance between the parentheses. This makes it less likely that the parentheses are close enough to be scanned as a single shape.

Or we can navel-gaze differently, and claim it's more a shape, because then it's a nicely rounded shape that contains the whole function application/call:

    (foo x y z)

    foo(x, y, z);

There is a small chance that you're doing the following in a Lisp or C, but you'd be doing something fancy that most people do not (like writing the internals for a pluggable framework or object system):

    (((f a) b ) c)    Pseudo-Lisp

    f(a)(b)(c)        Pseudo-C

If you were doing this, and you thought the particular code was hard to read, you could throw in a variable or two, for the intermediate function (or function pointer) values. Or use a combinator...

When you don't have this fancy function-that-produces-function-that-produces-function pattern, your list head will typically have the name of a function there, and then the syntax simple shape and indentation visually disambiguates.

In skimming the article, I did see something the article could've followed through on, for a good syntax criticism of many Lisps:

    f[a][b][c]    Pseudo-C, array access notation

Array-intensive Lisp code could use syntax/dialect extension for square brackets for this, if the Lisp doesn't already have comparable syntax:

    [m a b c]

In both references and setters; see my most recent mention of it: https://mastodon.online/@neilvandyke/117067069023420085