[jeremiep]

I completely agree it takes discipline and experience to write clean code in any language.

What I'm saying is that it takes more discipline to cleanly use Java or C++ than it does to use Haskell or Clojure. For the simple reason that most of the abstractions provided by the former languages add to the program's complexity rather than remove it.

There's an excellent explanation by Rich Hickey in Simple Made Easy: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy