> 1. Economy of expression

Funny, this list is the same one I use as to why I'm so annoyed with Clojure right now.

I inherited a mission-critical Clojure ML library my team uses for it's primary business goals. It was written 4 years ago by a research scientist- who quit 3 years ago. We know what it's supposed to do. We know that it seems to do the job well. We just can't understand the code well enough to be certain of what it's doing or how it's doing it. If this thing breaks or stops working, we're screwed.

The problem is that the author, like most of us, found great joy in writing very few characters to express very big ideas. Clojure let him do that to an extreme degree. And I'm sure if you were sitting beside the author, with him explaining these dense expressions, you would be enlightened at the elegance and beauty of this language.

Sadly, I was not.

I'm sure Clojure is a lovely language. But it lets you write a Voynich manuscript that compiles.

I've inherited code bases in different languages in the past, and generally, it's the unfamiliarity to the language that makes it harder. Especially Clojure, being so different, the unfamiliarity is even stronger.

For example, if you read the Clojure source code (https://github.com/clojure/clojure) are you similarly lost? Or when reading any random Clojure github project?

Also, is this the first time you inherit software like that? Like have you ever inherited other similarly complex piece of code in your main language? Because I have as well, and it is never easy, no matter the language and familiarity.

Not trying to attack you by the way, it may be true, but I'm trying to isolate the variable of it being written in Clojure against the rest to really get a feel of the effect Clojure has over what you are experiencing.