> It used to be the case that you were forced to learn Paredit pretty much from the start.

I started part-time in Clojure in 2011 and full-time in 2014. I've never felt like I needed any extra tooling for parens. Instead of typing `foo(x)`, I type `(foo x)`. It seems...almost exactly the same to me.

Same with text editors: people will say you need emacs, Cursive, etc. but I just use vim for Clojure, as well as everything else. It works great.