> Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think EDN really has anything to do with homoiconicity. You're just parsing in data (strings) into other data (internal Clojure data structure).
Part of the very real value in being able to print the data exactly as you'd type it in as a literal is repl-driven development and production logging. I can effortlessly print something to the production logs, copy/paste it into my development environment, and debug. So while it's true that string (de)serialization is an old idea, very few languages support one-to-one copy/paste (de)serialization. So often, other languages give you <Object_0xffa003> or something if you try to call x.toString(). Clojure makes it easy to move data around between systems, by emphasizing extensible, yet simple data structures.
Part of the very real value in being able to print the data exactly as you'd type it in as a literal is repl-driven development and production logging. I can effortlessly print something to the production logs, copy/paste it into my development environment, and debug. So while it's true that string (de)serialization is an old idea, very few languages support one-to-one copy/paste (de)serialization. So often, other languages give you <Object_0xffa003> or something if you try to call x.toString(). Clojure makes it easy to move data around between systems, by emphasizing extensible, yet simple data structures.