A Month with clojure

I’ve been using clojure actively for almost a month now. Here are some of my experiences so far.

Good

Getting started with the language is not that hard. Mastery is going to take a long time.
Cursive is a good extension of Idea with clojure support. Additional tooling like build via Leiningen, git, debug just work as expected.
Clojars is a great resource to find community built clojure libraries. Since leinigen can also download from maven repositories, there is not much of a library problem. There exist quality libraries for web stuff, testing, databases etc.
Clojuredocs is a life saver for understanding functions especially because of the examples.
core.async which implements CSP is pretty neat.
Getting used to basic lisp syntax with parentheses does not take that long.
Java interop takes some time taking getting used to with the order of object and method name, but it works great.
Functional programming.
Focus on data rather than classes.

Server start times are slow. Either leiningen or class generating is taking a whole lot of time. I guess I am not using the REPL correctly. Or I need to figure out hot-reloading of code.
So far I’ve not been able to figure our Paredit mode.
I’ve incorrectly matched the braces at times completely changing the meaning of the code. My return value from say a let expression changed completely and I’ve taken quite a bit of time to get back on track.
Code becomes pretty compact very easily making it less readable. I’ve wanted to add log lines in an if-else block and then adding a complete do block feels dirty. Code reviews are also harder as a consequence.
Java debug fails since generated code reuses the same code line and so next does not work as expected.
Being a lisp, some libraries are implemented DSLs which makes code less readable initially. Even destructuring trips me off right now. I’m just about getting comfortable with the -> and -» macros.

Essentially most of my negative comments are early pain points getting started with a language and ecosystem.