clojure-cookbook VS clojure-style-guide

Clojure Cookbook

Since it's encoded as edn, you could use clojure.edn/read with a file stream and read from the file as in https://github.com/clojure-cookbook/clojure-cookbook/blob/master/04_local-io/4-14_read-write-clojure-data-structures.asciidoc . The edn-seq function defined at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15234880/how-to-use-clojure-edn-read-to-get-a-sequence-of-objects-in-a-file is also viable if you are lazily reading and processing using sequences.

Fixed link to that style guide entry: https://guide.clojure.style/#opt-commas-in-map-literals

Per that style guide, the above map would be formatted like this (on HN, just indent by two spaces):

  {:a 1

As for the broader question of Clojure style, there are style guides like https://github.com/bbatsov/clojure-style-guide and tools like clj-kondo to help learn and reinforce important practices.

Basically, you learn the expected places to put whitespace, make sure to edit your code accordingly and all of the parens will be automatically closed and adjusted. Using parinfer—which you can also combine with the more traditional paredit—makes writing Clojure code a lot like writing Python.

Also, there are guidelines, the styleguide, clj-kondo, kibit etc. And if you don't review your interns/juniors code to teach them good practices - you're doing it wrong (well, this one is true for any practical PL out there).

Another good resource is https://guide.clojure.style/ -- the (unofficial) community style guide for Clojure.

It's not an answer to your question but i can refer you to https://github.com/bbatsov/clojure-style-guide

The same could be said about the "Clojure Style Guide" from the Cider guy. As a matter of fact, there was an issue about it that was quickly declined https://github.com/bbatsov/clojure-style-guide/issues/232

Formatting is not that great, see https://github.com/bbatsov/clojure-style-guide btw