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Some examples of things that make Clojure click quickly are being able to use seq operations on all core data structures instead of learning how to work with list, vectors, hash tables, and sets separately, documentation being great with tons of code examples on clojuredocs.org, and the fact that you know you need to "do everything the functional way" up front means less decision making. And prolific overuse of hash tables speeds things up too :)

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Thanks, that makes sense.

I'd expect you could make the same heavy use of hashtables in either, though I suspect it isn't obvious to lean on setf so much if new to CL? That, or if you are insisting on immutable structures?

I confess I assumed that alists are probably more competitive in speed for many collections than makes sense.

Well, for my project I am using CLOS in CL where I used hash tables in Clojure. But yeah, if I went for hash tables, it would be getfs and setfs to mutate the table, or I saw there are immutable operations for hash tables in CL as well. It just takes a little more code and cognitive load to work with.

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