I first learned lisp in college, and learned prefix notation and about the REPL before seeing any lisp programs. I never had the opportunity to be scared by all the parens. Honestly as a non-lisper the things that were most intimidating to me when looking at a chunk of lisp?
1. Nonstandard ways of doing things that are common in other languages, "setq" sticks out in particular.
2. Functions with lots of cars and cdrs but not much else.
3. Control structures. I didn't see conds and ifs very well because of the way they blended in with other functions around them.
4. Anything with lots of macro definitions.
Most of those are still pretty easy to overcome, but in terms of seeing lisp code and thinking "oh god," those were the biggest culprits.
1. Nonstandard ways of doing things that are common in other languages, "setq" sticks out in particular.
2. Functions with lots of cars and cdrs but not much else.
3. Control structures. I didn't see conds and ifs very well because of the way they blended in with other functions around them.
4. Anything with lots of macro definitions.
Most of those are still pretty easy to overcome, but in terms of seeing lisp code and thinking "oh god," those were the biggest culprits.