&gt; Come on. It&#x27;s totally obvious that the shapes of * and + are much simpler and much more distinct than &quot;sum&quot; and &quot;mul&quot;<p>I disagree that it&#x27;s obvious. Moreover, I don&#x27;t believe there is a measurable difference between the speed of recognizing &quot;sum&quot; and &quot;+&quot;, once you&#x27;re equally familiar with both.<p>&gt; The more identifiers, the less context per identifier.<p>I don&#x27;t believe it&#x27;s that simple, but we&#x27;re starting to go into semantics (which are part of comprehensibility of code, but not part of it&#x27;s readability I think).<p>&gt; If you don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a huge difference I can&#x27;t help you.<p>I think you can help yourself: just go and train yourself in reading prefix notation, like I did. Then get back to this example and then tell me again that there is a huge difference.<p>&gt; I&#x27;m sure I need about three seconds to parse the sexp<p>I don&#x27;t even know how to measure the time I needed to read the sexp, it was that short. And I even instantly realized that you&#x27;ve put parens around &quot;b c&quot; in the &quot;minus&quot; call, which would cause an error in most lisps.<p>&gt; Conversely, the infix&#x2F;symbol operators example I can map out with minimal, and linear, movement of the eyes.<p>That&#x27;s why I used newlines and indentation in my example above. To take your example:<p><pre><code>    (sum (mul a (minus b c))
         d)
</code></pre>
This also reads linearly, just in a different order than you expect. This doesn&#x27;t make it objectively harder or slower to read, it&#x27;s just unfamiliar to you.<p>Also see my other comment on familiarity: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11180682" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11180682</a>