Can someone help me understand the benefits of a Lisp or Lisp-like language? To me they feel overly verbose and make it more difficult to read code. What is the point of all the parentheses? I get that other languages have some weird syntax, but Lisp seems masochistic. Is there some actual advantage or purpose to it?
Consfigurator relies on homoiconicity for starting up Lisp images on remote hosts and giving them instructions. The user's specification of what configuration to apply to a host is basically just Lisp code and this can be trivially serialised and deserialised.