| Hi :) I feel your pain here and just wanted to let you know how common this is for programmers who initially try out Lisp for the first time. As others have alluded to, I promise this initial "parenthesis shock" goes away rather quickly as you read and write Lisp code. In my direct experience, I have hired junior developers straight out of a coding bootcamp who were able to pick up ClojureScript in their first week using Sublime Text with no editor extensions. In other words: you can definitely do this; it's not magic. I would strongly encourage you to check out Parinfer [1]. Parinfer makes indentation "significant" so you never have to worry about "closing the parens". Basically, if you can handle Python or CoffeeScript indentation, you can handle Lisp. There are no hotkeys to learn and it is available in most common editors today. For a first project I would recommend rewriting something you have already written and are familiar with. That way you can focus on just the language and not worry about the problem domain or "how to solve it". Just do a 1-to-1 port of something you've already done and compare how the two solutions are the same or different. I'm sorry you are being downvoted and being told to "just use emacs" or "use the REPL more". IMO, these are not helpful suggestions for someone new to the language. Good luck. You won't regret learning Clojure. One of the best things I have ever done for my career. [1]:https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/ |