Very much agreed. Although clojure might be faster, it is so so difficult to read, and from a rubyist's POV, looks like a disaster compared to python. Maybe that's just a result of being spoiled by super clean syntax and almost human readable methods... but that's gotta count for something
I'm a rubyist and now Clojure convert. The code does not look difficult to me, but i'm sure you can make it much more concise if you were to add some mutation in the Clojure code. As my career progressed i found that I don't care almost at all about syntax but semantics. Clojure offers far better semantics for almost everything including Data Structures, concurrency and meta-programming. That's were the true power of the language is on its semantics.