in which we cater to those with an allergic reaction to parentheses

A lot of people have been talking about how parentheses are such a big barrier to adoption of Clojure these days. Apparently they're pretty intimidating when you're used to a language with a lot of curly braces and things. While I can't do anything about Clojure itself, I realized we could make some changes to Leiningen that would allow newcomers to return to the comfort of XML. My latest plugin is called lein-xml, and it lets you write this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project>
  <groupId>org.leiningen</groupId>
  <artifactId>sample</artifactId>
  <version>0.1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <description>Just some kind of sample thing</description>
  <url>https://github.com/technomancy/lein-xml</url>
  <licenses>
    <license>
      <name>Eclipse Public License</name>
      <url>http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html</url>
    </license>
  </licenses>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.clojure</groupId>
      <artifactId>clojure</artifactId>
      <version>1.5.1</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>slamhound</groupId>
      <artifactId>slamhound</artifactId>
      <version>1.3.3</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</project>

...instead of this bewildering, unfamiliar invocation:

(defproject org.leiningen/sample "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT"
  :description "Just some kind of sample thing"
  :url "https://github.com/technomancy/lein-xml"
  :license {:name "Eclipse Public License"
            :url "http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html"}
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.5.1"]
                 [slamhound "1.3.3"]])

I know it probably won't be used by anyone who has spent much time with Clojure, but for newcomers hopefully this will remove one of the big blockers for enterprise developers trying out Clojure.

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