Agreed. These days I'm really fascinated by clojure and trying to learn clojure. Other than the project setup and repl and the editor (which I had considered), these weird characters are throwing me off.

What clojure really needs is some kind of opinionated framework or starter template, something like create-react-app. That has all these things figured out so a beginner like me can start playing with actual clojure, which documents all the steps to setup the repl and editor and what not. The last time I asked for this I was told about lein templates, they help but there's no documentation to go with those.

There needs to be some push from the top level. create-react-app was produced by facebook. Elm reactor (which lets you just create a .elm file and play with elm) was created by Evan the language creator himself.

tldr: There's a huge barrier to start playing with clojure that needs to come down and the push needs happen from the top level.