Infix notation with all the parens is the primary reason I never got comfortable with the lisps. My mind never worked like that. So I really believe there are valid personal preferences that keep people from liking languages right from the start. (I loved forth though. My mind took to it immediately.)
Sorry, in my post I never said or implied that having personal reasons for not liking something was invalid. Distinctly the opposite. The point I was making is mostly that not liking something doesn't mean it is less functional or successful. The parens in clojure are something to acclimate to, not a forever debt. But time and time again you'll see posts discounting the entire language because of them. Much the same with Go and lack of generics/verbosity.
> The things inexperienced users think are a big deal (in your example, line count) usually end up not being a big deal.
Indeed... like Python novices complaining about significant white-space.
Haha, that's fair!
Still a no-go though (jk).
But there is an order of magnitude quantitative difference here that is hard to argue will go away with familiarity (assuming the 10x line count difference estimate is right). Fitting 10x more functionality in the screenful of code you are looking at is a big cognitive advantage.
This is a pretty good example of feedback provided by language novices. You have almost no experience with the language, complained about an aspect of it (line count), and then said you wouldn't use it again, unless you would (as you defined in your closing parens).
I'm not trying to diminish your feedback at all. You like what you like, don't what you don't like, etc. Nobody is forcing otherwise. It's just an interesting pattern that you can see with parallels in almost any language. Much like when novice Clojurists say "I wouldn't use Clojure because of all the parens" - there are things that, for most novice+ users, just kind of end up not mattering a ton. The things inexperienced users think are a big deal (in your example, line count) usually end up not being a big deal.