What is meant is that Clojure rarely throws its own errors. Instead you'll get the underlying JVM error. And the underlying JVM errors are normally very noisy

What is meant is that Clojure rarely throws its own errors. Instead you'll get the underlying JVM error. And the underlying JVM errors are normally very noisy and often a little indirect to exactly what you did wrong. As someone who knew Java very well though, I've never had much trouble connecting the underlying JVM error to my Clojure code. That said, for beginners or people unfamiliar with Java, its an extra burden to have to decipher. And I myself wouldn't mind errors that point me more directly to my Clojure code, instead of towards its implementation.