paren, as its name suggests, relies heavily on parens (parentheses). It's
a not so subtle nod to Lisp's so called "crazy brackets". It turns out however,
that "crazy brackets" aren't so bad, as paren is a perfectly readable language
especially suitable for systems and web programming.
paren's philosophy is simplicity and power. The simpler something is, the
fewer bugs it has, and chances are, the faster it'll run. In a similar vein, the
more powerful a language is, the more extensible it is, the more freedom you
will get as a programmer, and the more efficient you will be. paren is
designed with these two goals in mind, and is now the fastest, most error
resistant, and most efficient language.
This is why paren only uses two characters in its character set, ( and ),
as having more characters only increases the chances of a typo and easily
creates crashing builds, which is obviously no good. All other characters raise
an error in development as paren adopts a fail-fast philosophy. However, in
production, non parens are gracefully handled by the interpreter and thus will
not crash your services if a developer accidentally commits a stray non paren.