[0xcafefood]

Agreed. I think Clojure strikes a pretty reasonable balance here. It's opinionated about the programming paradigm, scales back some of the pain that comes from reader macros, and solves some of the bootstrapping problems by compatibility with other JVM languages.

[harperlee]

I love clojure but the points still stand, kind-of.

  - There is Calva for VS Code but the community default is emacs and cider
  - How many programs in apt or brew are written in clojure? I'd concede that the community is great and focused on productivity, but it's so niche that you don't see much work out there made in clojure, and there is also a vestigial lisp sentiment to prefer building your own library from scratch instead of contributing to a standard library, which spreads  the efforts of a small community too much
  - Third one you need to mutate it a little bit: clojure is opinionated instead of having "so many ways", but its opinions, while great, are foreign to most programmers

[skydhash]

> There is Calva for VS Code but the community default is emacs and cider

Emacs isn’t required. You can always create a REPL plugin. Emacs just does a lot of heavy lifting for you due to comint, sexp navigation, and process management being included.

> building your own library from scratch instead of contributing to a standard library

Simple data structures lead to very generic function. You don’t have to write tower or massive spread of abstractions like in Java or TypeScript. A struct is nothing than a hashmap that can help a typechecker. Most lisp programs prefer primitives or functions instead of manipulating complex objects -never ‘buffer.name’ but ‘(get-buffer-name buffer)’-.

From a module, what you need are functions and an opaque state holder.

With such philosophy, you don’t need a lot of libraries, which are often designed to be complex, when you need a simple model.

> Third one you need to mutate it a little bit

You don’t. Clojure already does the optimization for you for the standard data structures, and they are the only things you need in most cases.

[Pay08]

I'm pretty sure he's talking about mutating the argument, as in taking issue with the opinionated nature of Clojure.