I didn’t have this in the wayback, but it would have helped.
https://clojuredocs.org/quickref
I came from a strong lisp background. Not using CLOS was (and still is) an issue for me. Stuff is stuck in my muscle memory.
From a typing standpoint, the inability to create rational information exchange definitions is a problem. Real typing (not implementation typing) is extremely powerful. And difficult to address in clojure. It some ways it is extremely good at it. In other ways, it’s horrible.
In lisp, premature optimization isn’t truly the source of all evil. People thinking that source code is documentation are. When you’re maintaining code, it is the best reference by far. When you’re using code written by someone else (or yourself years ago) it is the worst. It’s difficult to write and enforce interface contracts. While that’s true in many languages, I personally think it’s worse in clojure than many others.
I’m probably a bad person to write about this. I have somewhere between 30-70 languages under my belt. I’ve only disliked a handful of them. I’ve liked fewer. Much of the problem is where one is starting from. Starting in Smalltalk makes for an easier start than Java. OO languages are much easier to learn because functionality is naturally segmented in digestible chunks. People aren’t overwhelmed by everything at once. That’s definitely and issue for all of the lisp languages.
Haskell and clojure are the opposite side of the same coin. Clojure doesn’t enforce discipline, which means programmers are much more likely to write implementation code than code to the abstract problem. Both are good, both are bad. Scala is the coin run through a blender.
I suspect most young programmers are coming from python. Perl with words rather than characters. Not really, but that’s my big picture view of it. One can do anything easily, and most do. While one can write functional code with appropriate breakdown of responsibility, most don’t. Forcing yourself to do that is hard. A thousand times worth the price, but hard. It takes energy, interest, and I hate to say talent to do it.