This is a good point. I immediately dismissed Clojure when I played with the in-browser REPL http://www.tryclj.com/. Within moments, I imagined the daily plight of the professional Clojure developer tediously balancing parens like I had to do in that REPL.

Had I known how polished my workflow would be a year later with Paredit + Emacs in-buffer line-by-line code evaluation, or that tool-supported s-expression editing would let me write/refactor/move/nest code much faster than in other dynamically-typed languages, I would've stopped what I was doing and started learning Clojure immediately.

But you don't know any of that if you're someone going to http://www.tryclj.com for the first time.

Seems like Parinfer could be used in environments where you don't have Paredit available or, perhaps more importantly, where the user hasn't already credentialized in a niche tool for editing s-expressions.