I found that learning to read the lisp-style indentation (which is purely by convention but has widespread acceptance and tooling support) was a pretty fast process with a solid payoff. It becomes easier to jump between levels of detail, and I now find it to be more readable than C-style syntax, even though I only write JS for work.

For example, in the code above, “what it does“ is made clear by reading downward without looking very far to the right: it draws a button with a click handler and a label. There is a guarantee offered by immutability that says “anything deeper than my current level cannot affect things outside of itself.”

That may sound like a lie, since the :onClick handler updates an atom, but knowing that a dereferenced atom (@count) has a stable value during the lifetime of the function call resolves it.

I don’t know how strong that guarantee is with other lisps; I think Clojure’s immutability plays a key role though.

If anything, the clojure syntax has fewer rules to understand - from my very limited knowledge of it.