Comment by 7thaccount

I've had this discussion here on HN several times over the years. Lots of comments from others have pointed out similar experiences. I'm guessing your experience was more positive and that's great to hear.

I did point out that maybe things had changed a good bit (literally said maybe VSCode made that easier now as it has for other tools) and tried to make it clear that my experience was a bit dated.

As far as excuses go, I don't see how that's relevant. I just pointed out I had issues with a steep learning curve when I was seriously considering it many years ago along with other languages that are hosted on the JVM (Scala, Kotlin) or .NET (F#). Nothing against those languages, but all the tutorials and even many of the books at the time would frequently borrow from the host language in weird ways. Like I'd have to use some random Java library and when it didn't work, had no idea how to troubleshoot why it wasn't there and I didn't want to have to go learn Java first.

I own at least two books on F# and talked with some prominent authors personally and they admitted it was really geared towards intermediate or greater C# users who wanted to move over to functional programming. I could have stuck with it, but decided to stick with other tools.

Clojure certainly is nice and I wanted to take advantage of it...it just ended up not being as ergonomic for my needs as I had hoped.