If you compare every single language Clojure can emit - Clojure&Java, Clojurescript&Javascript, babashka&Bash, Clojure-Dart&Dart, Jank&C++, Fennel&Lua (even though technically Fennel is only Clojure-like) - the number of delimiters (and often even number of parens) would be universally higher than in the Clojure code. I guarantee it. Clojure has a lower delimiter-to-structure ratio. Java has parens that exist purely for syntactic obligations - `(if (`, `for (`, etc. It's not that Clojure has fewer parens absolutely, yet it has no wasted ones - that is 100% true.