[hombre_fatal]

Most people don't use those libraries, nor do most libraries use those libraries. They don't help me understand most code out there beyond my carefully orchestrated app code. I'm back to reading the source.

But this long list of runtime libraries is definitely a downside of Clojure. It's people trying to grapple with things mostly solved with static typing where you can just write a(b(c())) and it fails before it hits your fancy yet-another-thing-to-learn Malli library in runtime.

They might be great libraries, but you're only seeing one side of the trade-off.

I learned Emacs with evil-mode, paredit, nrepl/cider, and Clojure in my early 20s and used them for six years, and I was pretty gung-ho about it like you. But eventually I started using static typed languages for work and decided that I couldn't go back. It's like trying to read Javascript after you've spent five years with Typescript. You just think "wow, I can't believe I did that for so long."

And I'm remembering times I've used paper and pencil to figure out how map is being transformed as it's passed through library code. I don't miss that.