&gt; Comprehensibility is so much more than syntax<p>Absolutely. It&#x27;s a tender flower.<p>&gt; No. It&#x27;s just different way of getting to the same effect. I don&#x27;t see why would one be worse than the other (splitting things using infix operators vs. splitting things using horizontal and vertical whitespace).<p>It&#x27;s very important since size matters. Efficiency of encoding and cost of decoding (~ perception) matters. But if you don&#x27;t think it makes a difference -- fine, you are free to read braille instead of plain text even if you have perfect eyesight. You can also add three layers of parens around each expression if you think that&#x27;s more regular.<p>&gt; Do you think that we&#x27;re genetically programmed for reading infix syntax?<p>No. There&#x27;s this fact that all combinations of basic grammar are represented in natural languages: SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS. And then there are some programming languages which don&#x27;t differentiate between subjects and objects, but go for (OVO), VO, VOO, VOOO... (or concatenative style OV, OOV, OOOV...). Which is great since the goal of formalism is to be &quot;objective&quot;. (Note that Object-oriented programming is actually subject-oriented programming from this standpoint. It&#x27;s not &quot;objective&quot;)<p>Instead I say that it is more efficient if syntax is optimized for the common cases. Shorter is better, <i>if</i> the decoding won&#x27;t produce more cache misses. Infix and symbols don&#x27;t produce cache misses for the vast majority of humans, in the case of arithmetic (read: mostly sequential, barely tree-shaped) expressions.<p>Sexps are inherently unoptimized for the common cases. They are &quot;optimized for abstraction&quot;: for regularity. It is an explicit design goal to not differentiate things which are different &quot;only&quot; on a very concrete level. Instead of content, <i>form</i> is accentuated. This is not suitable for the &gt; 95% of real life software that is just super-concrete and where abstraction has no benefits.<p>I&#x27;m sure I have now given 5 to 10 quite plausible examples which support the standpoint that symbols-and-infix arithmetics is good for humans, based on how their mind works. You haven&#x27;t provided any counter-arguments but just shrunk off everything. But thanks anyway for that. I think I&#x27;m satisfied now with the examples that came out.<p>&gt; are you sure you&#x27;re as skilled with sexps [..] as with infix?<p>No. Never will be.<p>Are you? Show me a Lisp program with more than casual usage of arithmetics and tell my why you consider it readable. By the way, the first google hit I just got for &quot;lisp arithmetic readability&quot; is <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dwheeler.com&#x2F;readable&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dwheeler.com&#x2F;readable&#x2F;</a>