If you don't like the direction that the current default Ubuntu desktop is going, I suppose you could always try one of the variants, such as [Lubuntu](http://lubuntu.net/). That's where I'll probably head, since I'm running an older Ubuntu release and I'm pretty sure I'd rather not switch to Unity upon upgrading.
I can't blame Ubuntu for wanting to make their default desktop experience the way they want. It's their project.
Once you add indentation, and know the simple rule that args line up vertically (unless they're so short that you'd rather leave them), the following is pretty easy to read:
(/ (+ (- b)
(sqrt (- (* b b)
(* 4 a c))))
(* 2 a))
It tells me:
* there's a quotient of 2 things
* the first thing is a sum of -b and a sqrt
* the second thing is a product
and so on. Pretty nice. Of course, mathematical notation is more terse.
Perl 6 is still "Perlish", in the sense of TIMTOWTDI and DWIMmy-ness. However, after playing around with Perl 6 a little bit, I'm not convinced that it keeps Perl 5's practical simplicity.
I suspect that there's a whole crowd of Perl 5 lovers who just want something practical and simple -- they want a cleaned-up Perl 5 -- and they're scratching their heads wondering why the 6ers are spending so much time working on advanced features.
That said, I wonder about the possibility of taking an Emacs written in some other language and adding an Elisp interpreter to it such that it could make use of all the existing Emacs elisp out there.
In the comments, what important truths about GNU's nature is Tom talking about? (Where he writes "but recently I have learned, painfully, that I was only part of GNU by denying important truths about its nature.")
I can't blame Ubuntu for wanting to make their default desktop experience the way they want. It's their project.