I've programmed for 10 years in Clojure and have many regrets, but I've grown to just accept that Lisp syntax is correct. On day one you need to understand one thing. Years later, you need to understand one thing. And sure, in Clojure they happen to use three types of brackets for brevity but even that's optional. But other languages have dozens if not hundreds of little syntactical edge cases. I personally find that inconsistent mess repulsive.
The parallelism isn't actually that powerful, and in 2019 there's very little to set it apart. The building blocks are great, e.g. immutability everywhere, but few of the built-in primitives are actually usable (hidden unconfigurable thread pools etc). Stack traces still regularly horrible. Libraries are regularly abandoned. ClojureScript integrating with npm etc is more stress than you'd like. Core development is haphazard and proudly so. Types are nice, and spec is still up in the air, and slow, and not widely implemented, and will probably be rewritten several more times before being abandoned. Hiring is harder than a dozen other languages.
All that said, there is still amazing stuff happening. I hold out some hope that Dragan's work might spark a bigger stats/ML community on top of Clojure, for example:
Every day I can still write code and think "yay, that's cute", and be thankful for the dynamism and clarity it can enable. But I wouldn't recommend it to anybody, for anything really, and I feel sad realising that.
I had lots of pain dealing with CLJS but, since switching to http://shadow-cljs.org as my compiler, I've generally found that things "just work": instead of complicated messing with externs, you just npm install the package and then add `["vega" :as vega]` to your namespace's list of requires.
As far as the stack traces go, I have a hard time understanding why tooling like Cider's stacktrace filtering isn't wider spread: in Cider, when a stack trace pops up, it's one or two clicks to hide most of the things I don't care about and, yet, that information is still available for people working on the compiler or with Java interop.
Thanks for this, shadow-cljs looks very promising.
In terms of stack traces, it's not just the location in your code that you care about, it's the nature of the error. In lieu of spec being ubiquitous or anybody really checking their arguments ever, you're still left looking at 20 lines of stack beyond your own code to realise you've passed the incorrect type or structure somewhere. And even with spec you need additional libraries to actually yield human error messages in a lot of cases.
