> I'm a designer and not a coder, so I feel obliged to provide my comments with salt added up front.
If you are good enough to be able to pick clojure/script which requires a JVM and a specific approach to programming, then you are a programmer.
I feel that a certain amount of humility is due when commenting on a field of study that's not my own. I know that there are many—particularly here, most likely—who have thought far longer and harder about these problems than I have.
Edit: by the way, the reason I picked up Clojure is because I (for some reason) watched Rich Hickey's talk Simple Made Easy and thought to myself, "hey, that person is thinking of programming in the same way that I think about design." I felt that the design principles he described that guided the development of Clojure were very similar to a lot of things I've come to consider when designing for human interaction. So I thought that by learning Clojure I might become a better designer, even though I don't write code professionally.
After programming for many years I found Clojure pretty mind-bending, so definitely props for being able to pick it up.
Clojure 100% made me a better programmer. I got pretty in to it for a while but ended up punting and going back to React, and then later Vue, because I really started to feel like the "code is data" thing makes the code really hard to understand at a glance.
Example: in Reagent (this applies to all of the react-wrappers I think), displaying a table is as simple as returning a vector in a certain format; thus my code is a simple function mapping what I have (probably a vector of maps) to what Reagent wants.
Simple. Mathematical. But here's the thing - my brain doesn't work in functions that transform data. Instead, I'm trying to think in HTML, because that's the target result anyway. So I have to kind of parse the code mentally and mentally compile it to what it will "really" look like. Maybe I didn't work with it long enough to get used to it or something, though.
JSX, Vue, Angular really help with that mental compilation step and allow you to see something a lot closer to what's going to be actually output, and therefore make it a lot easier to reason about what the browser's gonna do.
Anyway, I was curious, have you continued working with Clojure very much?