If you've seen 300+ line react components marching off the right of the screen, you'll know that maintaining the parse tree in your head isn't a barrier to popularity.
While this made me laugh a bit, I think there's a meaningful difference between using "tree-like" syntax for all your code (lisp & S-expressions) vs declarative UI descriptions (JSX).
A deeply nested syntax is beneficial for UI work because you can correlate the structure of the code with the interface/document being rendered. S-expressions for HTML/UI in the form of Hiccup-style templates are equally good (if not better) for the same reason.
In JSX however, there is a clear syntactic distinction between behaviour (C-like JavaScript syntax) and interface descriptions (HTML-like element constructors). In Lisps, the uniformity makes it harder to quickly distinguish "behaviour" from "data", which is kind of the point, but comes with a trade-off in readability.
> In Lisps, the uniformity makes it harder to quickly distinguish "behaviour" from "data", which is kind of the point, but comes with a trade-off in readability.
Maybe in theory, but in practice it's easy to tell because in the case of hiccup, the data is data (as vectors) and behavior is behavior (as function calls), those have different syntax in Clojure.
Lisps are excellent at manipulating trees, which is exactly what HTML and the DOM is.
