I&#x27;m not really convinced S-exprs are particularly good examples of representing trees and graphs to humans while expecting them to be as easily readable and writable as the graphical forms.<p>You lose spatial intuition with this representation.  You could make up for it on small trees somewhat with indentation and vertical spacing, but you&#x27;d lose it again for larger trees and graphs.  We don&#x27;t pictorially represent our trees like this [1], for instance, which is roughly how the S-exprs visually appear.<p>When I author graphs in LaTeX, it is often easier to run through a compilation cycle to see what the result looks like and which edits are needed, rather than mentally reasoning about the edges by looking at the code.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;43Dc8YB.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;43Dc8YB.png</a>