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In my brief experience (so take my opinion with a grain of salt), it's the Clojure ecosystem around Clojure that is the problem, not the Java one it interops with. There is hardly any unification for anything except that it looks like Ring is the main HTTP lib (just for http; beyond that, how many routing libraries are there now?), and edit: there is a lot of library churn that goes with that, which to me totally conflicts with the language's reputation for being evolutionary and stable. Most libraries I have seen are written and maintained by a single author. 50% or so of the libraries I have seen are just plain dead questionably dead, including stuff written by Cognitect. It's not a healthy situation. It's a shame, because the language itself is awesome.

As a lisp I think the language is quite simple. I remember having a little trouble wrapping my head around immutability, but that was mainly it. It took me a year or so to grok macros.

Though when I learned Clojure, I was already familiar with Java and much less so with Javascript. Probably as a result, Clojurescript actually feels much more complicated to me.

I had neither Java not JavaScript background, but I found Clojure easier. Nevertheless, I did most of my learning in ClojureScript due to the visual feedback being the right learning tool for me.

Did you have prior JavaScript experience?