[throwaway96666]

In my experience jumping from a Clojure shop to a large Java shop a few years ago, the benefits of persistent data structures are overstated. Mutable collections are just as good for 99% of use cases. And they're a lot faster (in single threaded code) and occasionally mutation makes things easier.

The selling point of Clojure is that persistent data structures prevent several classes of bugs (unintended mutation, locking, etc.). But in reality -- as long as your team members are good enough programmers -- I don't see these kind of bugs happen in practice.

That being said I love Clojure and the standard library is the best out of any language. It is a great choice in the small market of "projects that need simple and correct code".

[slifin]

Looking at an object in my debugger back in my call stack and assume I'm looking at the value as it was but in reality it was mutated in a subsequent stack gives me trust issues

It's probably fine most of the time it's just when I have to get into the weeds I want to have stability

[throwaway96666]

That seems like a debugger problem, can't the debugger clone/maintain history of the object?

[grumpyprole]

This is like saying "the benefits of functional programming are overstated". If you are happy with mutable collections, you've happy with mutable variables, pervasive side effects and essentially the status quo. Many of us are not happy with the level of software quality out there and the status quo, Rich Hickey included.

[iLemming]

> the benefits of persistent data structures are overstated.

Well, what else is overstated?

- Structural editing? Fine.

- REPL-driven development? Okay, let's throw that out the window.

- Hosted nature and the interop? Gone.

- Destructuring? Eh, we kinda have it in Javascript, right?

- Concurrency support? Who needs that shit, anyway, right?

- Simplicity and elegance? Arguable. Some like verbose Typescript code more.

- Functional programming? What the heck is it even?

The point I'm trying to make is that you can't just "remove" an essential part of what makes a language. Rich Hickey took a year-long sabbatical (or was it two or even three years? I forgot) and used his savings to get this aspect of the language right. Without the immutable collections, the language would've been an entirely different beast.