Excellent points! From my personal experience I'd also like to add that there is a bit of preference involved. I find Lisp like languages much much easier on the eyes compared to Javascript or other C-like syntax. This is also partially due to the excellent support of s-expressions in editors with things like paredit [1], parinfer [2], or clever-parens [3]. With that functionality the syntax becomes nearly invisble and you're editing a /tree/ rather than characters. Coupled with autocomplete and auto-indent [e.g. 4], the code is much easier to manipulate in my experience (but again, might be preference)

[1] http://danmidwood.com/content/2014/11/21/animated-paredit.ht... (also http://emacsrocks.com/e14.html)

[2] https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/

[3] https://github.com/luxbock/evil-cleverparens (Vim with Emacs via Evil)

[4] https://github.com/Malabarba/aggressive-indent-mode