[arms]

I was very interested in Clojure and studied it for awhile. I liked it a lot, but had a difficult time becoming proficient with it. Part of it was the tooling (I tried learning Emacs and Clojure simultaneously when I should've only focused on Clojure), but my biggest hurdles were the syntax and understanding the error stack traces. They just seemed way too opaque. This really slowed down my progress. On the flip side, when I picked up Elixir, I became productive very quickly. Studying Clojure actually helped a lot here because I was familiar with functional programming and immutable data, but Elixir's familiar syntax and easier to understand error messages made it much easier for me to grok. I've since built a few things in Elixir and have been very happy with it.