I think Clojure has a clear advantage here: newcomers always complain about the parens and after an initial time frame we all get it and it becomes a non-issue

I think Clojure has a clear advantage here: newcomers always complain about the parens and after an initial time frame we all get it and it becomes a non-issue and as you progress, there is no baroque design, it just composes over itself. For someone new to Clojure like me, the problem with Clojure is that it's so easy to overlook an existing function and spend a while implementing something which already exists, even in the core libraries. I had a quick read to a Scala tutorial this weekend and what I remember the most is how ugly the syntax felt, even compared to other languages :-)