It is a myth that you have to be a genius programmer to pick up Lisp dialects like Clojure. I think it's the opposite: the cognitive load of more complex languages that are "easier to learn" than Clojure (like Scala or even Java itself, for instance), a complexity I consider accidental and not essential to whatever problem you are solving, is more difficult.<p>The hard part of Clojure really boils down to one thing: <i>you do not have an assignment operator.</i> If you realize you must now program without that, how would you do that? Answering that question in concrete cases is your only real problem.<p>Other things, like the parens, well, you stop even noticing them after your first few hours. When you first start, just move the paren <i>one word to the left</i> from where you're used to and you're good to go. The syntax after that is so simple, you will find it liberating.