Yes, all those at-signs make it look like a combination of lisp and perl, which probably won't excite too many people.
But I'd say that data munging is inherently ugly. I don't really see myself using this as the next tool to write clever algorithms that will stand the test of time, but if you offer me this as a stand-in for the usual shell-script/awk/sed/perl/printf/regexp mess you need for ad-hoc file transformations, I'm suddenly listening.
The at sign in the TXR pattern language is that way because TXR can match reams of literal text.
This is hard to show in small examples, so small examples become dense with the notation. Just like, say, tiny examples of HTML become a dense soup of tags.
Note that TXR Lisp doesn't have the at signs. You can write a pure TXR Lisp program by wrapping the whole file with @(do ... ).
TXR looks a lot better with syntax highlighting; unfortunately, this only exists for Vim. On the other hand, the syntax highlighting definition file for Vim is quite good.
But I'd say that data munging is inherently ugly. I don't really see myself using this as the next tool to write clever algorithms that will stand the test of time, but if you offer me this as a stand-in for the usual shell-script/awk/sed/perl/printf/regexp mess you need for ad-hoc file transformations, I'm suddenly listening.