Let me throw in a counter. I've been working with Clojure for over seven years, many of those on what is possibly one the largest Clojure code bases around (~15

Let me throw in a counter. I've been working with Clojure for over seven years, many of those on what is possibly one the largest Clojure code bases around (~150k loc, given clojure's conciseness, that's a lot). I find working with Clojure professionally to be a joy. Our team heavily relies on our test suite and jenkins in addition to the repl. Using the test-refresh plugin there is no jvm reload time between test runs. You edit code and almost before you look at the terminal affected tests are rerun. I'm not sure why a small fix would require so many version bumps, but that's not a clojure specific program. If you are doing good version control and modify a library somewhere deep in the dependency chain you will have to bump version numbers up the line no matter what. As for jars, again, I'm not sure why you have three unless you are running a big distributed system, in which case that seems inevitable. Uberjars package your entire program into one easy to deploy jar. Which brings me to another major strength of jars, deployment is amazingly easy. All you have is java and any jni libs as production dependencies. Updating requires modifying only one or a few jars. To me, that's a major selling point, not a negative. Meanwhile, deploying python to production is incredibly hard. Getting just the right set of library versions is a major pain. Do you use the system built in packages? Or perhaps you have to use pip, or another manager? Anaconda? In my opinion clojure is absolutely great for environments where you need to be pragmatic and move quickly. Being on the JVM and having great interop really contributes to that too. Being able to use the huge java ecosystem in addition to the clojure native ecosystem has meant massive productivity gains for us. It's surprising that others experiences are so different. Perhaps it's a lack of "best practice" documentation for clojure?