[lemming]

This is the reasoning that is used for Clojure - "Clojure is for experts". It's used to rationalise all sorts of design choices that make the language much harder to get started with than (IMO of course) it should be.

If you're implementing a system that users have to use for their job, they'll put up with whatever they have to while they're learning it. If you're implementing a programming language and you want to increase adoption and general user friendliness, I think this is a terrible choice.

I love Clojure now and I work with it every day, but it's still frustratingly hard for avoidable reasons even though I'm a pretty advanced user. I'm jealous of the attention that Rust, Elm and Elixir pay to this aspect of language design, and I'm very pleased to see languages taking it more seriously.

[sambe]

I guess the optimum has to be some kind of "area under the learning curve" but I think it's pretty clear if you made a binary choice optimising for people who already made the effort makes a lot more sense. Is Clojure really that bad? I don't know it, but I never had the impression there was an anti-newbie community. Sometimes people take these binary positions as a decision-making optimisation too; having that policy just simplifies a lot of discussions, perhaps.

[throwaway7645]

Agreed. All of those were easier to deal with than Clojure, but that could just be because it is a pain to do anything with the JVM and emacs isn't easy either.