Are there really that many who mind the parens? Everyone who teaches intros in lisp-languages seems to worry about this but do we really find people getting stuck over that? It's really just about convincing the brain to see the FUNCTION/operator* is up front in every set of parens. That's actually not true in most languages, even the part about there BEING a function inside the parens. Every language has brackets, even if it is noise "words".

BTW, I have working REPLs to ClojureScript/Om/ReactNative apps running on Android just the last couple of days. iOS should be easier but need to set up an OSX VM to show that.

The parens seem jarring at first. During the workshop i mostly struggle I had though was with NightCode trying to be helpful. When I switched to emacs, things got better however there where times where I would miss a parens and spent a minute or two matching them up. I can't image that being any different for the first few months until I started learning tricks for auto balancing or training myself to finish it. When I am working with Java for example I let IntelliJ do most of the annoying work for me. I am pretty sure I would forget semi colons or miss brackets here and there. And generics... forget about it

I mostly rejected LISP in college. Two of my biggest complaints were parenthesis wrangling and problems understanding mutable cons cells.

Paredit solved the parenthesis problem and Clojure solved the mutability problem

@arielvalentin the only trick is to use paredit. Never manually wrangle parens. Trust me.

Once you use a structural editor like that, the parenthesis become almost invisible. I have a hard time editing code in languages with irregular syntax now.

@norman: emacs minor-mode Paredit?

Yeah, I'm with you on parens wrangling

Paredit for the win

@arielvalentin we have enough new people it might be worth doing a paredit tutorial. or maybe better yet a review of all the structured editing techniques.

Including the parinfer that the clojure environment we were using used

That would be interesting to me.