[john2x]

I'm a Python user and I love Clojure. I guess I missed the Go bus. But there's 2 things about it I'm not too fond of.

One is due to it's declarative nature (which I love), it's quite difficult to get up to speed with unfamiliar code.

The 2nd is due to it's JVM roots. Those stacktraces, man. And when it happens on an anonymous funtion in a not so documented library, ugh. It's like hitting a brick wall.

The first, I can deal with enough practice and Schema/core.typed. Is there any hope for the stacktraces to improve? How do other JVM based languages fare in this regard?

[calibraxis]

Oddly enough I never used this, but maybe named fns might help? (http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--%28fn%20na...)

    (fn my-name []
      (throw (Exception. "boom")))

(Sorry, I don't know Clojure internals well enough to have great answers to your explicit questions.)

[Edited: thanks to jerf for pointing out the inconsistency in a term I used.]

[jerf]

Named... anonymous... functions? Wuzzah fuzzah?

[weavejester]

They allow you to use recursion without the need for a Y-combinator.

[awj]

Yeah, that's a terminology issue. They mean lexically scoped named functions. Versus the default in Clojure of global or namespace scope.

[larholm]

Just like in Javascript.

[emidln]

Named anonymous functions are there to allow you to call the function recursively while inside it.

i.e.

    (= ((fn factorial [x] 
          (if (<= x 1) 
              1 
              (* x (factorial (dec x))))) 5)
     120)

Note, this isn't run under TCO (see loop/recur).

[ufo]

Also, in your example, the recursive call is not in tail position. You would first need to rewrite it to use an acumulator parameter.

[seacious]

There are people working on improving stack traces[1][2], but there is no standard solution yet.

[1] https://github.com/AvisoNovate/pretty

[2] https://github.com/mmcgrana/clj-stacktrace