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for sure, what folks complain about the most (syntax) is where it's power is.

I've been getting Guile recently and find the very tight integration with C to quite nice. It's like the best of both worlds

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When I first learned Lisp, I quickly got to the point where I "don't even see the parenthesis". Shortly after that I learned to love them, and see them (and Lisp's simple syntax as a great strength).

Now extraneous syntax, even in a half-Lisp like Clojure, seems ugly to me. It's a real pity more people don't appreciate the elegant simplicity of Lisp (and especially Scheme).

Just a curiosity -- why do you call Clojure a "half-Lisp?"

Not me, but I would guess it's because, while both Common Lisp (ie. SBCL) and Clojure are both Lisp-like languages per se, Clojure departs further from "pure" Lisp than Common Lisp, in that it replaces lists with things such as vectors in a lot of places (see defn syntax).

It could also be that it is hosted on the JVM.

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