Parens don't matter to anyone who uses a decent editor. Try (I think) "M-x lisp" in emacs (or, even better, install slime) or ":set ai lisp" in vi.
With parens, emacs and vi will auto-indent your code for. There's no need to think about it, and, since they also highlight matching parens, there's no need to think about that, either.
Without parens....well, I hope you're good at hacking elisp, 'cause otherwise you're going to waste a lot of time manually indenting your code.
