The Clojure code is shorter, but that's almost entirely because it's dynamically typed. And that's not necessarily a benefit, either. Cheshire just takes JSON and turns it into plain old Clojure data (maps, vectors, strings or keywords, etc.) whereas Aeson requires the programmer to manually unroll the whole structure from top to bottom into user-defined types. But by doing so it guarantees that if something is missing or unexpected, the code fails early and fails fast. Plus the static typing enables compile-time checking of all your code which uses it, rather than how Clojure accesses JSON which is so often stringly-typed because that's easiest/shortest/fastest.