To be really honest, a Lisp programmer doesn't really see that many parens in his code. And clojure doesn't even have those many parens. Maybe its just me, but I have only seen those who haven't used Lisp complain about too many parenthesis.

It was easy to dismiss Clojure for Scala and Haskell when I was first exploring functional programming.

Clojure was alien. When extrapolating what it might be like to work with Clojure, prefix notation (+ 1 2) was an obvious downgrade to infix notation 1 + 2 in a REPL. Arrow-keying your way around s-expressions on http://tryclj.com/ just seemed to confirm it.

But it's sort of like Vim: if you could see your Clojure workflow in a month, you'd be sold now. But since you can't, and since you don't know about Paredit, and since you don't realize that you probably will never even use a REPL since you'll be evaluating code in your actual source files, it's hard to be convinced and that's just how it is.

And there's still the risk of a month going by, just like in Vim, where you never even arrive at that killer could-be workflow because you never happened to stumble upon it and you don't even know it exists.

Indeed. Once you get hold of it, the REPLs and the prefix notations seem like a life saver, just like the complex Vim and Emacs key bindings.

Most just look at the code from outside, frown at it and leave without ever knowing the immense power the language and its workflow gives you.

As I mentioned, but you still downvoted me, I didn't downvote lisp. I have used lisp - required to use it in a course. And I do recall seeing that many parentheses in lisp programs. I recall seeing that many parentheses (and curly braces) in C, C#, Java, Javascript, Perl, Scala, groovy, PHP, and other programs, too. Let's not pretend they don't exist though.

I do not downvote people people for expressing their opinions. Also I doubt if I have enough karma to do that. Someone else did. :)

What I meant was, Lisp programmers usually learn to ignore the parens. When I look at a Lisp code, I just see indentation and code. Your eyes train themselves to do that. Also I have never found excessive parens to be an issue at all. But like I said, maybe thats just me.