| I got into clojure as a hobby for more than one year I am not an expert yet by any means. It took me a long time to become productive in Clojure. There were simply too many things to learn at once, from syntax, to tools, to, more important, change of paradigm. I did the mistake to also learn Emacs at the same time (love it, but it just took too much time that I didn't have). I know feel very productive because everything is done in the same way and those dozens of functions you mention is all I have to use 95% of the time. It takes time to learn them and even more to become proficient, but once you are there everything is very simple and fast. There are two misconceptions that took me way too much time to realize: - Macros are unfortunately needed sometimes, but they should be avoided as much as possible. DSLs are better done with data structures.
- REPL driven development is messy and stateful (you keep modifying vars all the time). A test driven development is much better. Having the REPL is still valid and all what you need most of the time for simple things, though. Clojure can be very productive, but it requires significant (in my particular case, very significant) investment to get there. In the process, I learnt a lot about FP and, more importantly, about how to model almost anything as immutable data. Once this clicked on me, working in languages without this support for easy manipulation of immutable data structures looks like going backwards. |