Shorter it is, obviously, but when things become more convoluted, I don't think so, you have to memorize priorities, add parenthesis to change them and things like this. The great strength of the prefixed parenthesed Lisp-like notation is to be systematic. IMHO.
I think that using lambda instead of λ or even \ helps eyes to read convoluted code, to find the most important element of the language. And when I replace well known names like "true, false, cons, car, cdr, nil, isnil?] by such cryptic characters "|, ø, □, [, ], ?" it's to reduce long lines to short sequences of signs getting a chance to be viewed as a whole picture easy to memorize. A matter of choice. Maybe it's inconsistent.
You say "this is really more a lisp than a λ-calculus." Long time I thought that {lambda talk) was a lisp and today I think it is not. Lisps use to begin with several primitives, (cons, car, cdr, ...) and never go down to the reduced set [word, abstraction, application]. I found useful to start from this infrastructure, I think I can better understand concepts. And later will come several superstructures to reach the level of a usable programming language.
I think that using lambda instead of λ or even \ helps eyes to read convoluted code, to find the most important element of the language. And when I replace well known names like "true, false, cons, car, cdr, nil, isnil?] by such cryptic characters "|, ø, □, [, ], ?" it's to reduce long lines to short sequences of signs getting a chance to be viewed as a whole picture easy to memorize. A matter of choice. Maybe it's inconsistent.
You say "this is really more a lisp than a λ-calculus." Long time I thought that {lambda talk) was a lisp and today I think it is not. Lisps use to begin with several primitives, (cons, car, cdr, ...) and never go down to the reduced set [word, abstraction, application]. I found useful to start from this infrastructure, I think I can better understand concepts. And later will come several superstructures to reach the level of a usable programming language.