[iLemming]

I've been programming for over four decades as a hobby and more than twenty years professionally. I have gone through dozens of languages and still trying to learn more. Getting into Clojure still remains one of the best decisions I made in my life. I don't know why mainstream programming media - publishers, meetups, major conferences don't talk about Lisp (as if it doesn't matter at all). Common Lisp perhaps has created this aura of elitist culture (similar to Haskell) - "you have to be this tall to ride this rollercoaster", etc. Turns out, Lisp really is not that difficult. You don't need years of accumulated knowledge to start programming in it. If you know just a single mainstream PL - you already have almost everything you need to start, because pretty much every single programming language has been influenced by Lisp.

And Clojure, unlike Haskell, is way more down-to-earth and enormously practical. I'm not saying Haskell is not, but let's be honest, for anyone to start writing production-grade Haskell would take weeks, not hours. While Clojure needs minutes. These days you can just download the Calva VSCode extension and start playing with it.

Even if one thinks "there's just no way to use it at work", there are so many smaller things they could use it to improve their personal workflows. "Of course, when you only know a hammer, everything looks like a nail", someone might say. Yet, for me, who has seen, learned and used dozens of different "hammers", this one does look quite interesting. For a bunch of pragmatic reasons. And my message to any "hammer-wielding craftsman" - you really don't need to try dozens of hammers to see the value in a good one, and Clojure is a pretty darn good one, I promise.