petre parent
This comes up all the time. I used to dismiss lisps and schemes as well because of parens until I've messed with Racket. My advice to you is to stop worrying and embrace parens. The REPL helps.
As an emacs user I'm often writing small snippets of elisp for my own needs, and for snippets it's fine. But I dislike what most lisp's scoping strategies do to "normal" indentation of code. Any function with even a single intermediate value, indented due to a `let`! It's noticably more symbols compared to my Python stuff.
On top of that, being unable to just slap in big docstrings in my code makes me sad. Docstrings are useful.
This isn't the end of the world, but it's something that bugs me.