I felt the same way as you until I actually tried Clojure. In a few hours all my rejection of the parens dissapeared because I finally understood. Try solving

I felt the same way as you until I actually tried Clojure. In a few hours all my rejection of the parens dissapeared because I finally understood. Try solving a small problem in Clojure (a code Kata, or a problem from Project Euler) and you'll see those aprehensions against the parens will go away. Nowadays I'm having trouble to accept the syntax of other languages, eg. Scala :-)