As a long-time Clojure user, I find the claims that many Clojurists put forth that Clojure “has a minimal amount of syntax” to be quite misleading, especially toward beginners.
I think Clojure has a lot of syntax. The syntax is just embedded in a number of conventions, macro mini-languages, and the reader syntax itself. Because Clojure’s syntax can be extended in user space (via macros and related tooling), the syntax also grows more rapidly than other communities.
As a professional programmer who came from Python, Java, C, and JavaScript, I found a lot about Clojure compelling, but “minimal syntax” was not one of the compelling points. To the contrary, I think there is a lot more to learn in Clojure than other languages about how to properly structure your code.
As I wrote in my blog post comparing Python and Clojure:
> ... the Python programmer will observe that in the Clojure program, many aspects of the program are implied, rather than annotated by special syntax. Many Clojure proponents will say that Clojure has a “simple syntax”, but I think this is misleading. They don’t mean simple as in “easy to read without prior context”. They mean simple as in “unceremonious”. Perhaps they mean simple as a contrast to “baroque” (how you might describe Java or C++’s syntax). Clojure does have a syntax, but it is implicit from the layout of the code in the list data structures.
This is nominally a library as it can be implemented via the language primitives. But in practice this occupies the same space as Haskell's do-notation, and the learner cannot ignore it. The lack of special syntax becomes an implementation detail.
I think Clojure has a lot of syntax. The syntax is just embedded in a number of conventions, macro mini-languages, and the reader syntax itself. Because Clojure’s syntax can be extended in user space (via macros and related tooling), the syntax also grows more rapidly than other communities.
As a professional programmer who came from Python, Java, C, and JavaScript, I found a lot about Clojure compelling, but “minimal syntax” was not one of the compelling points. To the contrary, I think there is a lot more to learn in Clojure than other languages about how to properly structure your code.
As I wrote in my blog post comparing Python and Clojure:
> ... the Python programmer will observe that in the Clojure program, many aspects of the program are implied, rather than annotated by special syntax. Many Clojure proponents will say that Clojure has a “simple syntax”, but I think this is misleading. They don’t mean simple as in “easy to read without prior context”. They mean simple as in “unceremonious”. Perhaps they mean simple as a contrast to “baroque” (how you might describe Java or C++’s syntax). Clojure does have a syntax, but it is implicit from the layout of the code in the list data structures.
http://amontalenti.com/2014/11/02/clojonic