[harperlee]

But that's due to named parameters vs. positioning, not parenthesis; I can mirror your argument with:

Python:

  model = Sequential()
  model.add(Conv2D(32, (3, 3),'relu', (28, 28, 1)))

Clojure:

  (defonce net-bp
    (network (desc :input-shape [128 1 28 28]
                   :type :float
                   :something :nchw)

It all depends on how desc is defined.

Disclaimer: no idea what those functions mean, I only made syntactic changes.