I agree.  Lisp just plain <i>looks</i> weird because of all the parentheses and the prefix notation.  I also can't help get the feeling that even with macros available to me, coding directly in the form of parse trees just might not be optimal.  Also, it makes my head hurt sometimes.<p>As I sit here writing this, it strikes me that someone who's using these kinds of things to avoid learning Lisp is a lot like the Python newbie who's discovered the language and wanders on to comp.lang.python complaining about the syntactically significant indentation.  As with most matters, I'm inclined to believe that Lisp's problem here is primarily a people problem rather than a technical problem.