[finalfantasia]

I was passively introduced to Clojure when I joined my current team at my current company a few years ago. After spending 5 years in a humongous, horribly-maintained Java code base, and a short period of time with a new-ish Scala code base that was littered with code written in almost all kinds of programming paradigms (procedural, object-oriented, and functional) and then being intimidated by the incidental complexity of the language itself prior to this transition, I was frustrated to realize the cruel fact that I had to learn another JVM language that feels even “weirder” and more “complicated” than Scala. At first, I had similar questions as you have now: “What makes this ‘ugly’ language so special that one of our smartest team leads preferred it to, say, Scala, Go, or Rust?” It was not until I watched one [1] of “Rich Hickey’s Greatest Hits” [2] did Clojure finally “click” with me. It’s all of those principles that were applied and the values that were upheld when Rich Hickey designed this elegant language. I cannot reiterate all of them here. Go watch those talks and give this language a serious try. You might end up falling in deep love with it just as I did. :-)

[1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hi...

[2] https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits