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by iLemming·7y ago·view on hn ↗
> A lot of programming languages today, like javascript, already has functional stuff within it

Yeah, but there's more to it than just that. You can find bits and pieces of good things in Clojure that influenced other languages, but in Clojure, they just feel right. Take, for example, immutable data-structures - there were many attempts to implement them for different languages, but somehow the way how they work in Clojure just feels subjectively better. Or the REPL. Of course, you'd say: Javascript has a REPL, Python has one, etc. But if you dig deeper, you'd find out that Clojure's REPL is somewhat better (it is hard to explain, one has to experience what makes it better). Standard library: Javascript is like a complete meth-head here - there's folktale, crocks, sanctuary, ramda, fantasyland, lodash, lodash-fp, immutable.js, etc. and you know, sometimes "more" is not necessarily "better"; Python's praised batteries can also be pretty frustrating. Whereas Clojure's standard library somehow feels much nicer and has a minimum amount of surprises. Stability of the language is almost legendary. Migrating a project from one version of Clojure to another won't cost you your leg.

Yes, Clojure is not a silver bullet (there's no such thing as "the best general purpose PL"), but it's specifically designed to minimize the frustration. And if you felt different, you probably haven't had enough exposure to it.