I tried Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, but it couldn't generate a 50-100 line Clojure file without having broken parens mismatches. I know Clojure isn't super popular, but the syntax is pretty simple and the frontier models do fine with it.

You are comparing a 35B models to a 635B+ frontier model, of course thats not even close

I'm not lamenting that they aren't close, I'm saying Qwen will frequently output code that isn't even syntactically correct, even when the syntax is simple. Which makes it unusable for coding.

To be fair, they don't have the text editor highlighting all the matching parens. I'd be lost too.

Yeah prediction models and many parentheses are probably not a good combination, but we're not talking about anything exceptionally complicated here. I have had syntax issues in Python as well.

It really depends on the language, popular languages work pretty good

try q8, check your parameters. qwen3.6-35b-a3b should definitely be able to do so with no issues at all.