Again, it's very weird to single out one type of control character. You have to compare syntax trade offs holistically. However, even when you straight up compare parens, there isn't a significant difference. Pretty much every language, except those using whitespace, will have two parens for arguments and curlies for the function body, or a statement. This is roughly the same number of parens you end up with in Clojure, minus all the other characters. The difference is just not that dramatic in practice.