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It’s a real statistical outlier, nearly every language people have moved on from gets negative reviews. Me, it was fun but it wasn’t for me and eventually I concluded a number of the fundamental design decisions were wrong.

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Can elaborate which design decisions were wrong and why in your view?

Here’s one: Mike Rettig wrote a great post about this in the early days, long since lost to time. Didn’t take that much note of it at the time but grew increasingly convinced over time: shared memory primitives are a bad idea. We would have been better off with an architecture that prioritised message passing. (Not that you can’t do message passing in Clojure, just that it isn’t privileged the way STM is.)

Can you expand on that a bit? What language do you use now?

These days, it’s mostly C#. It’s got one of the most sophisticated list processing modules of any language I know of, you can fairly easily write heavily immutable code. It’s a bit niche because Microsoft but it’s nonetheless solid.

My downsides compared to Clojure: no destructuring in parameter declaration. No immutable by default.

But it turns out I prefer typed languages. Which isn’t a thing I’m going to argue about!

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