For the parenthesis issue, just use a decent editor like vim or emacs and it is a non-issue.
Tangent: I was on the Muni the other day working w/ Scheme on my laptop, and this guy sitting next to me turns out to a CS master's student. We talk a little about lisp, and it turns out he doesn't like it, because he couldn't handle having to balance the )'s.
I was like, "counting? the editor does that for you..."
Turns out he was programming with notepad. I was blown away that someone working on a CS masters would use notepad for lisp (or any other serious programming task).
