You don't really need it when reading tutorials either. Rainbow, simple matching, or manually counting parens is very much helpful when you're editing code, not so much when you're reading, at least if the code follows standard formatting idioms. You really get used to it: http://www.loper-os.org/wp-content/parphobia.png I would even argue you don't even absolutely need matching despite its helpfulness since Lisp was done and is done on many primitive editors without such features including pen and paper. As a first order approximation, you have just as many parens (braces, brackets) as a C-like language, the opening one is just on the other side, and C too can be done just fine with primitive editors.