What do beginners love about clojure

This is like a reverse of the topic “What do beginners struggle with?”. As beginners, let’s share what made us really get interested in Clojure.
So i have been learning Clojure for a few months now, before that I had tried learning python but no matter how i tried i just couldn’t understand the concept of classes and OOP.
Anyway, a couple of things that really made me get into Clojure (FP in general), i would say are

  1. Recursion, After reading the book Clojure for the brave and true, I’d say my understanding of recursion has increased.
  2. The Clojure community, as a beginner the openness and friendliness of the community has been pretty awesome.
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Fully agree on this. :slight_smile:

For me, the Lisp syntax is a relief from worrying about things like operator precedence. The language also feels very elegant.
The other things that got me interested in learning Clojure were macros: the idea of meta-programming seems (intuitively) to be very powerful, though I haven’t gotten there yet.

I’m still learning, and am very much a beginner, so my views will probably evolve along the way.

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For me the nicest thing is the limited scope I have to keep in my head when looking at a piece of code. You have a function. It takes some arguments. The arguments are (most often) just data. You don’t need to worry about methods, lifetimes, etc, just what you want to do to that data.

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The parens! I really like them and looking at LISP code sparks joy. Everything else like immutability and functional programming just makes sense to me and are nice to have too. :upside_down_face:

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  1. The Clojure community, as a beginner the openness and friendliness of the community has been pretty awesome.

Yup, definitely the friendliest community I’ve had any interaction with. I have yet to get a “RTFM” or a “this is the wrong place to ask this question” or “have you even googled it?” People have gone out of their way to answer my inane beginner questions like they are actually important. I find the language hard, and the resources few, but the community more than makes up for it.

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Pervasive immutability. I was initially attracted to Clojure because of STM, but I quickly found that immutable data works just fine in most scenarios.

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