> I can't memorize all thousands of functions to manipulate lists and hashs in clojure (get-in, map-vals, conj, dissoc, select-keys, sorted-map-by, do you know what all those do?) which do a lot, I felt clojure was dense, the opposite of little cognitive load

Funny, I would say that it’s the functions for manipulating data structures that makes clojure a joy to use. To me it feels like there are very few of them, and there’s a lot of consistency which makes it easy to guess what one does if you haven’t seen it before (once you’ve learned map, map-keys/map-vals/mapv don’t really need learning etc). Yes there are actually a lot, but I basically only use a dozen or so. Would be interesting to see the frequencies of clojure syntax vs other languages.

Clojure was my first (professional) language though, and I have used it every day for the last 4 years. I guess it’s different if you’re trying to learn it on the side.

I have dabbled in a few other languages on side projects (js/go/swift/svelte) and while there are definitely big improvements to be found in the tooling, nothing really matches Clojure as a language for me. Though I won’t claim that ‘clojure is more productive’, I will claim that ‘I am more productive with Clojure’, probably largely for the same reasons that you are not, it’s comfortable for me.