You got that exactly backwards. A non-lisper unavoidably has to deal with tons of syntactic and semantic clues - parens, colons & semicolons, square brackets, indentation & white-space, special chars, static type annotations, lsp servers and tree-sitter parsers. Lisp only needs two things - a [small] set of structural idioms, and a live REPL.
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You got that exactly backwards. A non-lisper unavoidably has to deal with tons of syntactic and semantic clues - parens, colons & semicolons, square brackets, indentation & white-space, special chars, static type annotations, lsp servers and tree-sitter parsers. Lisp only needs two things - a [small] set of structural idioms, and a live REPL.