I am actually familiar with Lisp and was wondering what to do to bring people over, not try it myself. I doubt the parentheses is a huge problem, because like you said, it can be trivially automated using your favorite tool.<p>I think what the Lisp world needs is a huge push from one of the big players. Not just an in-house, small-ish tool, but rather a publicly-facing bet on it, as dramatic as Facebook&#x27;s bet on javascript with reactjs, or Twitter&#x27;s move to Scala. After a 15 minutes survey I couldn&#x27;t find an example of a big, respected company whose tool chain has a substantial Lisp project for other people to contribute to. Sure you can find multiple companies building Lisp solutions, but those rarely open source them and even when they do they are no where near as substantial to warrant massive public attention.<p>I sincerely think that this the only thing standing between Lisp and universal adoption.