But you can format and indent your lisp code so the reader (people) doesn't have to rely on counting parentheses.

Example from taken from http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

  (defun test-+ ()
    (let ((*test-name* 'test-+)
          (another-var 'foo))
      (check 
        (= (+ 1 2) 3) 
        (= (+ 1 2 3) 5) 
        (= (+ -1 -3) -4))))

You should be able to read what this code does (check basically runs the statements and reports if they return true or false) without having to count a single parentheses.

I agree that lisp can be made readable. And C can be made unreadable.

OTOH lisp encourages deep nesting, which makes it harder to be readable. Here's a rougly equivalent program, if I read the lisp correctly.

  void test-+()
  {
     *test-name* = test-+;
     another-var = foo;
     assert( 1+2 == 3 );
     assert( 1+2+3 == 5 );
     assert( -1 + -3 == -4 );
  }

I'm not saying that this is any better than the lisp equivalent - the lisp function is certainly more elegant. But because C is procedural/stateful, it's more natural to have flatter programs.

And flat programs are easier to make legible, because you're less tempted to put multiple things on a single line to avoid going another level deeper in your indenation.

I agree that the C version is slightly more readable than the Lisp version, but this slight improvement comes to a big price which is the difficulty to programmatically parse and generate C code.