As someone that was a hardcore Lisper (you could find me arguing that Scheme is not a Lisp, etc.) before adopting Clojure: I thought muddying the language with a new kind of syntax was terrible.
I don't suggest that this is what primarily drove the lack of adoption of other kind of braces but I, as a follower of the church of Lisp, had an immense dislike of the lack of purity.
In the end vector and map "syntax" is just the reader being more ergonomic in Clojure than in Common Lisp. (See https://clojure.org/reference/reader for details)
After I also got over my aversion of the Java ecosystem and just accepted that the jvm can be great without thinking Java is great, I'm all in on Clojure for the last few years.
I think the language is fantastic and due to the huge amount of interop I can use my favorite language in settings that would be difficult otherwise.
I've used Clojure on the web as ClojureScript, as backend as Clojure, on a ESP32 and reMarkable as ClojureScript and since relatively recent I can even accomplish scripting tasks with very good start-up times using babashka.
I'm a super happy camper and I've found my language for life. A pragmatic Lisp. (duck because stones are incoming.)
Well I mean CL is absolutely littered with pragmatism it came out of a standard committee after all. In many ways I'd argue clojure is far more opinionated, it's just an opinion that might more closely align with modern sensibilities.
I don't suggest that this is what primarily drove the lack of adoption of other kind of braces but I, as a follower of the church of Lisp, had an immense dislike of the lack of purity.
In the end vector and map "syntax" is just the reader being more ergonomic in Clojure than in Common Lisp. (See https://clojure.org/reference/reader for details)
After I also got over my aversion of the Java ecosystem and just accepted that the jvm can be great without thinking Java is great, I'm all in on Clojure for the last few years. I think the language is fantastic and due to the huge amount of interop I can use my favorite language in settings that would be difficult otherwise. I've used Clojure on the web as ClojureScript, as backend as Clojure, on a ESP32 and reMarkable as ClojureScript and since relatively recent I can even accomplish scripting tasks with very good start-up times using babashka.
I'm a super happy camper and I've found my language for life. A pragmatic Lisp. (duck because stones are incoming.)