>> The parenthesis do require that you have at least a moderately capable editor to navigate them effectively.
I disagree, with a caveat--writing code using a terrible editor requires knowledge of the indentation rules for the language, regardless of whether that language is a lisp, Perl, Ruby, etc.
However (the caveat), although the indentation rules for Perl, C, Python are relatively simple (indent after a '{' or ':', line up arguments), each function/macro in a lisp can have different indenting rules (e.g. in CL compare `let' to `multiple-value-bind' to functions, to lists, to the various `with-*' macros, etc).
Once you know the library for a specific implementation, the indentation rules become more obvious; at this point, using (e.g.) Notepad isn't particularly terrible (until that knowledge is acquired, though, yikes).
Notepad is exactly what I'm talking about. With Perl, C, and Ruby, at least, there really aren't any indentation rules - your program will work fine even if you don't put any in at all, or do a hacky job of it. With Lisp, especially when modifying someone else's code you're stuck counting parens.
Oh, also a weird (maybe crackpot?:-) theory of mine: parenthesis, graphically, don't form a nice, rigid vertical line, but sort of point diagonally, possibly making it just that much harder to see how they line up. In any case, 4 or 8 space indented C/Tcl/Ruby/whatever code is certainly more obvious to the eye.
I disagree, with a caveat--writing code using a terrible editor requires knowledge of the indentation rules for the language, regardless of whether that language is a lisp, Perl, Ruby, etc.
However (the caveat), although the indentation rules for Perl, C, Python are relatively simple (indent after a '{' or ':', line up arguments), each function/macro in a lisp can have different indenting rules (e.g. in CL compare `let' to `multiple-value-bind' to functions, to lists, to the various `with-*' macros, etc).
Once you know the library for a specific implementation, the indentation rules become more obvious; at this point, using (e.g.) Notepad isn't particularly terrible (until that knowledge is acquired, though, yikes).