Only if you don't consider a forest of parens to be noise. I do. I'm sure I could get used to it after a while, but at first glance, Python code is definitely cleaner than Lisp.
(But whitespace sensitivity has always struck me more as a way to enforce specific whitespace conventions than anything else, and even as far back as Pascal I've been religious about maintaining indention in code. It's easy to do with a decent editor (or not) and helps the readability immeasurably.)
I studied Lisp and Scheme at university and that’s where it had to remain for me: academically entertaining mind puzzles in data structures and algorithms. It’s just not productive or easily graspable from one coder to another.
The following does exactly what you'd expect, and there are even cooler ones like `some->` or `as->`.
(->> some-nums
(map square-root)
(filter even?)
set
count)
There's a reason for it, for sure, but it's surely a part of the learning curve.
Remember that what is being passed through the threading macro is not the request, but the handler function itself. Each middleware takes the old handler, wraps itself over it to do things before and after the old handler. The threading macro is not a representation of the path your request will take, it is a way to build up a chained function that represents your final handler, which will then receive the request. Suddenly the ordering makes perfect sense :P