In practice you end up with less parens than in most languages to express the same thing though. Also, the parens are largely what allows for structural editing

In practice you end up with less parens than in most languages to express the same thing though. Also, the parens are largely what allows for structural editing: https://cursive-ide.com/userguide/paredit.html https://cursive-ide.com/userguide/paredit.html When I work with Clojure, I'm able to think in terms of blocks of logic as opposed to lines of code. This is extremely powerful. The JVM is certainly not a limitation for many applications out there. Conversely, since Clojure has recur, the only time lack of TCO comes into play is when you're trying to do mutual recursion. I haven't run into a single case where I needed that in 6 years working with the language professionally. However, Clojure is not really tied to the JVM. It runs on both Node.js and CLR. I'm actually currently working on a Node based micro-framework for Clojure: https://github.com/macchiato-framework/macchiato-core https://github.com/macchiato-framework/macchiato-core