Thing is, Clojure is not at all a 'pure' functional programming language, it has all kinds of facilities to mutate state (and very well thought ones in my opini

Thing is, Clojure is not at all a 'pure' functional programming language, it has all kinds of facilities to mutate state (and very well thought ones in my opinion). If you had to categorize it, it would be more like the 80% functional language James is talking about. If you are struggling in Clojure, i know this is a common argument but i think it's true, it's probably because you didn't code enough in it for this style of programming to become natural. Moreover,and on a side note, i'd very much like an example of what was very hard in clojure and was straight forward in Lisp ,whatever lisp that is, i assume CL. It would be interresting to me to know what kind of code does seem hard to produce at first in clojure.