They are likely to be more useful when using Clojure as a serialisation syntax for data (much like how JSON is used with JavaScript), rather than when used dire

They are likely to be more useful when using Clojure as a serialisation syntax for data (much like how JSON is used with JavaScript), rather than when used directly in source code. I assume that these extensible literals will be ported to the JavaScript and .NET implementations of Clojure, making it easier to work with rich data types without having to pepper your code with calls to date parsing functions, etc. Having an intuitive, idiomatic concept of 'data' at the heart of your code is an important aspect of Clojure. In comparison, I find it hard to the answer the question, "How is data represented in Java?" Which is why I find doing things like data transformation to be far easier in Clojure than in Java.