the article was hardly a rant You'll have to admit it's extremely thin on actual arguments. There are lots of links to journal publications, but it would have

the article was hardly a rant You'll have to admit it's extremely thin on actual arguments. There are lots of links to journal publications, but it would have helped to summarise their actual findings rather than hand-wave about "complexity". Composing locks and transactions in the same system sounds much harder to me than just using locks. I think the jury is still out on the effectiveness of Clojure's concurrency model. Actually, Clojure does address that by allowing you to compose transactions with agents. If you send messages to agents during a transaction, they will only receive the messages sent from the transaction attempt that successfully completed. This leads to a fairly natural state-change-then-I/O pattern where the agent locks the non-memory resource and operates on it.