Why is it customary to put many closing parentheses on one line in Lisp-based languages?

Question

Usually code looks like this:

(one-thing
    (another-thing arg1 (f arg5 r))
    (another-thing arg1 (f arg5 r)))

Why doesn\'t it like this?:

Answer 1

There are two points to be made here:

1. Conventions are important in themselves. Sticking to wrapped parens means your code is more readable by other lisp programmers, and if you adopt this style you will also develop practice at reading theirs

2. The advantages of splitting )s onto their own lines are not actually advantages in the eyes of most lispers. If you are using a half-decent editor it will have commands that understand balanced expressions, for moving across them, cutting, pasting, transposing, etc. So you don't need

   )  ; end of the loop
   

   in lisp any more than you need

   # end of the loop
   

   in some whitespace-sensitive language like Python

See e.g. http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Expressions.html