[oalae5niMiel7qu]

When the code needs to do something that it can't do, there is a massive cognitive load associated with figuring out how to do something approximating it. When the language or a framework is associated with lots of "how do I X" questions, the answers to which are all "completely rethink your program", that is evidence that the language/framework is not reducing cognitive load.

[gleenn]

I'm optimizing for a large, complex corporate projects, not beginners on toy projects. And I would also add that if you search for "how do you do X in Y language", you'll probably find every combination of a lot of languages so I hardly think that is grounds to dismiss Clojure. More and more languages seem to be embracing immutability and static functions are everywhere. The two are just utilized well and believe me, if you need to refactor something then you are so much more at liberty which is certainly a high bar IMHO.

[oalae5niMiel7qu]

>I'm optimizing for a large, complex corporate projects, not beginners on toy projects.

There's nothing about large, complex corporate projects that demands that languages impose arbitrary restrictions on code, except the fact that so many corporations insist on hiring incompetent fools as programmers, often to save money in the short run by expanding the potential labor pool. They call them "guardrails", but a better metaphor would be the playpen. If you hire only competent developers, then you don't need to put them in a playpen.

>And I would also add that if you search for "how do you do X in Y language", you'll probably find every combination of a lot of languages so I hardly think that is grounds to dismiss Clojure.

Well yeah, it's pretty much the norm in popular programming languages to make certain things impossible. And programming is driven by fads, so we're going to see more and more of this until it finally goes out of fashion one day and some other fad comes along.

[gleenn]

Please elaborate what programming language you think isn't a fad and isn't a playpen and why. Restrictions on languages IMHO clearly narrow what you have to think about other code doing. Whether it's marking a field "const" in C++ or having the borrow checker in Rust or having private fields in Java or immutability in Clojure, all those things make it easier to know what a large system of code /cannot/ do, and that makes it easier to maintain. That has nothing to do with people other than it might be you fighting years of code that you wrote yourself.