> So, a language where, say, blocks are started sometimes with parameters that are delimited with pipes, and sometimes the bodies need a terminating end keyword, other times they need wrapping curly brackets. If you want an explicit lambda, you have to wrap that whole block in curly brackets with a lambda keyword. Classes and functions need an end delimiter but not an explicit start delimiter; if statements however need both a start and end delimiter in "if x then y else z end"

You are talking about syntax here.

> Ruby is not semantically sane, it's insane in a way we have all gotten used to.

I hate Ruby even more. It is just as semantically insane as Lisp, and the syntax is worse.

> (If you don't know ruby, try to rewrite this for your ALGO language of choice, I picked ruby for its simplicity)

Ruby is not simple. It is full of corner cases and redundant constructs. It is hard to make any sort of reasonable guarantee about a Ruby program without resorting to some heavy testing. And no matter what nice property you might have wrestled out of the system, someone else can destroy it anyway by means of monkey patching.

> S-expressions are about as semantically sane as you can get

S-expressions are syntax with no intrinsic semantics.

> it's just most of us have a <5 year head start with the craziness of c-style languages.

What about Haskell? (And, in general, languages that have a denotational semantics that makes equational reasoning feasible.)

For more details, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954348