Comment by lispm

> major weakness is that it makes everythign unergonomic in order to make macros very ergonomic.

Generally Lisp has two main goals:

* allow code to be data and data to be code

* make coding and coding code (let code manipulate code) interactive

The s-expression based syntax was found to be useful for both. For the latter it means that code can be manipulated interactively for example by structure editors or in read-eval-print-loops which work with data. That makes interactive code writing very ergonomic.