Just What IS Clojure, Anyway?

Look at this line of code: processCustomerOrder ( customer , orderItems ) Any developer with six months of experience knows roughly what that does. The name is explicit, the structure is familiar, the intent is readable. Now look at this: ( reduce + ( map f xs )) The reaction most developers have is immediate and unfavourable. Parentheses everywhere. No obvious structure. It looks less like a programming language and more like a typographer's accident. The old joke writes itself: LISP stands for Lost In Stupid Parentheses. That joke is, technically, a backronym. John McCarthy named it LISP as a contraction of LISt Processing when he created it in 1958. The sardonic expansion came later, coined by programmers who had opinions about the aesthetic choices involved. Those opinions have not mellowed with time. And yet Clojure – a modern descendant of Lisp – ranked as one of the highest-paying languages in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for several consecutive years around 2019. Develop