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Clojure is simpler, defaulting to immutable data structures literals and a good REPL is superior to most of that tooling IMO.

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Those are great features of a great language to program with, but when you are talking about adoption, you want good, easy tooling to expose the good stuff. When the first two chapter of the oft recommended Clojure for the Brave and True are just about setup and and long Emacs tutorial, you are putting up a barrier to using the language.

Agree, wouldn't recommend Clojure to beginners. As it stands today, it is a tool for experienced programmers mostly.

That is so untrue. I personally have seen people learning Clojure. Absolute beginners with no programming experience and mature, seasoned pros. It is much simpler even than Python and Javascript and a lot more simpler than Java or C++.

"Clojure for the Brave and True" is just one of the many (matter of fact I just checked on Amazon - there are over 50 books on Clojure, I stopped counting at 50, I don't know how many more out there)

And that's probably the only book that recommends setting up Emacs. It was published in 2015. Back then maybe the argument about tooling made sense, but honestly, have you looked around lately?

Every major editor today can be set up for Clojure programming.

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