Using multiple kinds of parentheses in Lisp considered silly

Complaining about parentheses in Lisp is like complaining about the heat in the kitchen—as Jamie Oliver said, the cocktail of hot oil, sharp knives and cocaine is fucking lethal. Wait, what am I trying to say? Anyway, I'm not going there.

I'm stealing a picture from that post though, to show something that bothers me:



Yeah, that WTF? is spot on, but for a different reason.

Note how a couple of unshapely ]'s have snuck their way into the midst of that lovely column of gorgeous )'s.

Now why is that WTF?-worthy? Well, one of the Big Benefits of using just two characters for all punctuation is the editing convenience you get from that. After you've moved code around in Lisp, you just keep your finger on the delete key until the superfluous parens are gone for good, or, else you just keep your finger on the )-key until the right amount of parens are where they should be.

This is completely broken when you use, for some irrational reason, a second or – gasp! – third kind of parenthesis. Doing that brings you back to the laughable world of lots of irrational and silly punctuation. You have to manually match up a [ with a ]. Think about that! It defeats one of the Big Benefits of using S-expressions, the only sane, rational syntax there is.

Silly.

(Of course, a lot of the time you use Emacs's sexp-aware killing and stuff, and then you can get away with multiple kinds of parens. But still, that doesn't work in the general case.)