And yet, Clojure has less parens than your average JS program. Even Java has more syntactic sugar.

Just compare:

    foo.bar(baz)

to:

    (.bar foo baz)

Same number of parens...they're just in different places.

Sure CommonLisp has a ton of parens, but thats CL and it has its own set of issues.

One more example:

    Runnable foo = new Runnable() {
      Object run(Object bar)
      {
        return bar;
      }

    }

vs

    (reify Runnable
      (run [bar]
        bar))

Less parens, no brackets, no semicolons, and no ceremony. This "parens are killing Clojure" meme is just a straw-man.