[fsloth]

Each time someone complains a working program is not "idiomatic" in what ever language I die a little inside.

That makes it sound you approach this from a haughty presumptuous, uncharitable angle.

It sounds like you exclude the possibility that the author did not try it "your way" first, for example, but found a simpler way to implement it.

"That's not the most obvious to do it IMO" or "I would have preferred to do it like this..." are much better ways to approach this. Programs should be beautiful and understandable, but "idiomatic" sounds it excludes lots of simple beautiful solutions to a problem out of pure dogma.

[thom]

Clojure is a mostly pure functional language, it is very uncommon to have almost all logic reach out to global variables to do work. It’s also rare to see multithreaded code that eschews most of the mechanisms built into the language for multithreading. These two things together (pure functional programming and strong concurrency primitives) are arguably the fundamental motivations behind the language. You value simplicity: Clojure can help make this code simpler. If there’s a succinct way to say that without the word idiomatic, one with fewer negative connotations, I will try to use that in the future.

[fsloth]

And those are valid critique. I'm sorry - my prior response was harsh now I'm reading it again.

We all like to critizice things that offend our sense of aesthetics. But criticism always hurts the author. It's ok if it hurts if it is valid critique. And the only way to get understood is to be explicit.