[CarlSmotricz]

The parentheses are only one hurdle that Clojure makes you jump over, though. The other is Functional Programming.

I read an article here or on Proggit a few weeks ago by a (semi-professional?) game programmer who reviewed his own attempts at writing a real-time arcade-type game (PacMan?) in a functional language. Yes, he got the thing working and it even performed decently but he was irritated that if he really stuck with the paradigm of not having alterable state, some small changes to his app's functionality would entail changes in all kinds of places in the source.

Happily, Clojure gives you explicitly alterable state and a bucketload of mechanisms for working with those. But still, after months of practice I still struggle to get my head wrapped around FP. Typical business software programmers (as I picture them) might have similar troubles.