I actually find Clojure's syntax more confusing with all the punctuation they threw at it. Compare that, for example, with Scheme. I like the idea of keeping Lisps "pure" if that makes sense. In Lisp, the first element of a list is the operator. Okay, then how is Clojure a Lisp when it has vectors like this [1 2 3]? Unless [ is a macro that expands [1 2 3] to some real Lisp-y expression under the hood.