[nathan7]

Accepted, but they seem to be on either side of a dividing line — I'm doing my best to straddle it, but I'm still held back by a wall of language that is too often entirely impenetrable to me. I'm a very functionally-minded programmer, and I'm rapidly adapting to Clojure now (coming from rather functional JS, and having spent a rainy week on Haskell, which taught me basic type theory and such) — but I still often hit the wall of impenetrably abstract things too :(

[loup-vaillant]

It takes time. I used to read many Haskell related papers, and many things were impenetrable. Then, from time to time, one of them was suddenly obvious. Then another. And another.

The best advice I can give is, don't be content with words and labels. Search for the underlying structure. Take monads for instance. Lots of tutorials, lots of examples. But I didn't really got them until I read the Typeclassopedia: when you get to read the word "monad" you realize it was explaining the monadic structure in depth from the very start.

Practice also helps. Implementing a Parsec clone in Ocaml helped me understand applicative functors and monads. (I also experienced some of the disadvantages of strict evaluation.) You may want to try that in Clojure.

Finally, when something seems impenetrably abstract or obscure, that may be because you lack some basic vocabulary. For instance, you can't understand a paper on type inference if you don't know how to read type rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rules Which you can't read if you don't know what's an environment… As I said, it takes time.