| That is very, very far from the truth. You obviously haven't probably tried Clojure. I think, among all the languages being actively used in the industry (in business, not academy), Clojure perhaps can be crowned as the simplest of them all.
The ingenious of Rich Hickey was to design it the way that the essentials were made simple and complicated stuff either unnecessary or pushed onto the edges of the ecosystem. Clojure can be learned à la carte - from the basics to more advanced things. Or if you want to dive straight into more difficult topics, you still can do it, and preliminaries would be minimal. I can argue that Clojure is easier to learn than Kotlin, Python, Javascript, or Ruby. That is not a mere opinion - I know many people for whom Clojure was the very first language. And they tried to apprehend other PLs later, and it was a confusing and frustrating experience for them. It is easy to start with Clojure. One simply needs to be less skeptical about things that people (mostly those who are unfamiliar with the language) criticize it for: - They say, "It is hosted on JVM. JVM means Java, and I hate Java", and therefore ignore the fact that JVM is a very robust piece of tech, and you don't need to write any Java at all to use Clojure, you don't even really need to know Java. - They say, "JVM has a slow startup time." But once you try Clojure's REPL (which is a real REPL, unlike in other, non-lispy languages), it becomes a non-issue. - They say, "It is a Lisp, and parentheses look scary." But once you learn structural editing idioms, it becomes so frustrating to deal with all the punctuation in other languages. - They say, "It is dynamically typed." But once you learn Clojure.Spec you may discover that you can do things with it, that most type-systems simply can't. I encourage everyone to try to learn some Clojure, because it is fun. |
By the way, I love Java, love Kotlin even more. Don't bring the JVM and other languages down to Clojure's level just because Clojure is clutching onto the JVM's coattails.