Indeed, I often catch myself swearing at the visual mess created by the use (and abuse) of parentheses (and all kinds of other brackets), the mess you have to deal with when coding in C++ - especially with lambdas, but also with any sort of nested code - classes, function calls, etc. At these moments, I can't help thinking that Lisp code would look cleaner and more readable, while the C++ syntax, by contrast, looks ad-hoc and inconsistent - especially with the growing context-dependency of the meaning of symbols like the ampersand, the asterisk, the square brackets, etc.

I recently did a project in C++ and, at times, it felt like C++ was designed to parse every possible sequence of characters as a valid program.

That prize belongs to Perl.