Clojure Error Messages Are Accidental

But its not. And if you take the time, like 30 days, to learn Clojure to intermediate proficiency levels, these issues disapear.

Its hard for me to convince you of this, because its definitly asking for a leap of faith. But think of it like starting Kick Boxing. At first, your knuckles hurt, your chin hurts, but spend 30 days at it, and you just adapt and those pain points disapear. All of a sudden, you feel great, stronger, faster, more agile. That was my experience with Clojure. And ya, just like Kick Boxing, once in a while, your knuckle might hurt again, or your chin, but unlike in the beginning, its very rare, and goes away really quickly.

EDIT: To add more concrete weight to my argument. Here's some of the things I believe contributes to making those issues disapear. The consistency and simplicity of the syntax. Most docstrings call the same things with the same names, and have a similar writing style. The REPL driven development means you can quickly explore and self learn how a function behaves. The immutable data structures avoid a lot of mistakes and simplify a lot of logic. The higher level loops and branching do a similar thing. The easy composability of data transforms become second nature. The functional first style makes writing tests easy. You always end up with little code, so there's just less that can go wrong. And I think most importantly, the Clojure source is easy to read and very accessible, so its often a better documentation then any docstring could be.

Spec assertions (not pre/post checks) can actually be compiled completely out of production code so those can really be nothing (but not if you're adding them in wrapper layers).

> Moreover, the more senior you are, the more you begin to appreciate clear precise error messages that directly point to the problem.

Hopefully the more senior you are, the less you encounter errors in the first place.

> There's only so much brainpower, and I'd rather spend it on solving a problem, and not on figuring out/memorizing yet another cryptic error message.

And I'm saying that's not the Clojure experience once you're up and rolling. You iterate over program construction in small manageable chunks, with immediate feedback from an editor jacked into a cider repl, and your repl experiments evolve into long-standing tests.

Also, even if the Clojure language doesn't necessarily cater to the beginner, the Clojure community definitely does. There are constant efforts to evolve better docs, extend tooling, and build user groups that reach out to beginners.

The truth is, the issues that come out of your current model of programming makes you seek something that trades them out for other issues. Right now, those other issues are unknown to you, and you're not feeling the pain they bring. 10 years from now, they'll be all you complain about, and the trend will go back.

Now, maybe I'm wrong, but its rare that a truly better paradigm shows up. It happened before though, so might happen again. Maybe that'll be inferred static types, but we've had those for so long already that I'm doubtful. For example, Clojure has infered static types, a lot of people tried it and felt it was more trouble then worth. So in the small Clojure world, the trend to infered static types already happened and passed by back to runtime contracts.

Nowhere have I said that if you see an error message you don't know how to program.

I face errors every day, but I don't face errors that are so cryptic that they block my productivity. We agree errors are useful even if we disagree that Clojure's errors are bad.

I did find the errors very confusing when I was getting started, but I think that was because the errors use Clojure terminology that I had not yet learned.