[fendrak]

As far as functional languages go, it's a nice compromise between the absolute purity of something like Haskell and the day-to-day practicalities necessitated by building practical, scalable things quickly (core.async, nice Java integration, runs on the JVM).

As far as looking like a parenthesis layer cake, that's part of the Lisp "tradition", really. One can look at is as the price you pay for true homoiconicity and powerful macros.

[dllthomas]

"the absolute purity of something like Haskell"

Working with Haskell for a while, "absolute" there starts to seem weird - there is room in "programming language space" for "more pure than Haskell", and some attempts at it. I've not drawn any conclusions yet as to whether anything in that space is practical, but it's certainly interesting.