It's not because they're unaccustomed to the special characters in syntax, quite the contrary, it's because those special characters have associated meaning for them, through Perl and Unix shell.
When I was first learning Lisp I was frustrated by the syntax for characters; #\a means the letter a, or 'a' in C, both are three key strokes, and I didn't understand the unusual convention. Well, it's because Lisp allows named characters, like #\Tab and #\Newline, along with custom unicode characters like #\Arabic_Alif. Aha!
Unix-syntax is almost always single-purpose; that doesn't help reuse, and causes reader-table over population. Lisp, and functional-language style syntax is there for a very good reason, usually your own good.
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It's not because they're unaccustomed to the special characters in syntax, quite the contrary, it's because those special characters have associated meaning for them, through Perl and Unix shell.
When I was first learning Lisp I was frustrated by the syntax for characters; #\a means the letter a, or 'a' in C, both are three key strokes, and I didn't understand the unusual convention. Well, it's because Lisp allows named characters, like #\Tab and #\Newline, along with custom unicode characters like #\Arabic_Alif. Aha!
Unix-syntax is almost always single-purpose; that doesn't help reuse, and causes reader-table over population. Lisp, and functional-language style syntax is there for a very good reason, usually your own good.