> The most confusing argument is the one that s-expressions are good because everything looks the same, which to me sound like arguing that the best way to pain

> The most confusing argument is the one that s-expressions are good because everything looks the same, which to me sound like arguing that the best way to paint is to only use one color, which I vehemently disagree with. The point of the syntax isn't necessarily that everything looks the same, it's more around why that's the case and what other properties it enables. In other words, if a homogeneous (and arguably less convenient) syntax is the downside, it's important to consider the upside too. This still not make it 'better' enough for to want to use, but maybe will shed some light on why reasonable people might think differently. The core concept behind Lisp syntax is that Lisp has a handful of core data structures, and the user syntax of the language is defined directly in terms of those structures. Clojure uses sequences, vectors, hashes to do things like represent blocks of code, argument lists, and type declarations. The structures used for this are the same as the structures uses in user code, and what you type in to the keyboard when you program are the normal textual serializations of these structures. So this gives a couple of benefits: 1) The character sequences used to represent the language are easy to parse in a structural way without a whole bunch of parsing logic. A structural editor for Lisp doesn't necessarily need as complete a grammar or parser to enable the structural features as does a language like Java, Scala, C, etc. 2) It's easier to generate or manipulate code. Most famously, this enables things like macros. Macros and code transformations are absolutely possible in languages like Java and the JS ecosystem, but less commonly used and more expensive to develop. There are many other examples of where these properties come in handy, but JSX turns out to be a reasonable illustration of why these are useful. Adding something like JSX to Javascript requires an explicit preprocessing state. Then, it also requires specific editor support to deal with the modified syntax. Once all that's done, what you have is a wrapper around 'React.createElement'. It says a lot about the value of application-specific syntax that people are willing to pay those costs to get a certain syntax, but the Clojure/Lisp approach (hiccup for markup) reduces the costs and makes that kind of thing significantly easier to do. Whether or not that's the tradeoff you choose to make is one thing, but there are reasons to make it.