Parentheses are not Lisp's problem. The lack of useful and compatible libraries is.
Lisp is basically a ghetto where it's every man for himself. You have all the tools to build the most wonderful abstractions ever, and many people do. The problem is that person A's abstractions don't play well with person B's. And that means where the other less-perfect languages have libraries that everyone can share, with Lisp, you're stuck with your own.
This is not a result of syntax flexibility, though, it's the result of attitude. Perl has pluggable syntax and nine billion different ways to do OO. And yet, all the syntax extensions are composible. An object created with Moose can be subclassed "by hand". It all works.
It's attitude, not tools. If you believe that you're the smartest person in the world and that only you see the light... well, it's going to be lonely. And programming is about 50% being smart and 50% not reinventing the wheel. The attitude of a "smug lisp weenie" immediately puts him 50% behind.
(BTW, I say this as a CL fanboi. I love the language. I can just never do anything fun with it, because I have to decipher ten different libraries for writing unit tests, none of which have all the features I need.)
It's not a lack of libraries - there are probably too many libraries, and all of them subtly (or blatantly) incompatible and difficult to use together.
You need a bootstrap. Ideas for libraries come from writing applications. If you can't get some sort of app started, you aren't going to have any ideas that should be distilled into a library.
Lisp is basically a ghetto where it's every man for himself. You have all the tools to build the most wonderful abstractions ever, and many people do. The problem is that person A's abstractions don't play well with person B's. And that means where the other less-perfect languages have libraries that everyone can share, with Lisp, you're stuck with your own.
This is not a result of syntax flexibility, though, it's the result of attitude. Perl has pluggable syntax and nine billion different ways to do OO. And yet, all the syntax extensions are composible. An object created with Moose can be subclassed "by hand". It all works.
It's attitude, not tools. If you believe that you're the smartest person in the world and that only you see the light... well, it's going to be lonely. And programming is about 50% being smart and 50% not reinventing the wheel. The attitude of a "smug lisp weenie" immediately puts him 50% behind.
(BTW, I say this as a CL fanboi. I love the language. I can just never do anything fun with it, because I have to decipher ten different libraries for writing unit tests, none of which have all the features I need.)