Clojure isn't actually a purely functional language. It's more of a consenting adults language that guides you towards doing the right thing by default. If you

Clojure isn't actually a purely functional language. It's more of a consenting adults language that guides you towards doing the right thing by default. If you write idiomatic Clojure code, then it will be written in a purely functional style. However, Clojure won't stop you from writing imperative code or adding side effects if it makes sense in your particular scenario. Lisp family of languages also have a lot of tangible and very practical benefits. The syntax is simple very regular, so there's less mental overhead involved in reading it. This helps avoid errors because there's less ambiguity about what the code might mean. The syntax also makes relationships in code explicit, making it more scannable. In most languages it's not immediately obvious if the lines next to each other are related. On the other hand, s-expression syntax effectively provides you with a free diagram where you can see relationships visually. The syntax also facilitates structural editing. Instead of working with lines of text, you work with expressions, and you think in terms of moving blocks of logic around. You can see some examples here https://calva.io/paredit/ https://calva.io/paredit/ The syntax also makes it very easy to serialize code, since code is expressed as plain data structures. This also facilitates powerful metaprogramming facilities. You can apply the language to transforming any code written in the language. Another practical aspect of Lisps is live coding workflow where you connect the editor to the running instance of the application. This creates a very tight feedback loop where you can try things and see the results immediately. This is strictly superior to the traditional workflow where you have to restart the application and build up state to see the results. It's also much faster than using TDD. You can use the REPL for exploration, and then write tests once the code is in the state where it's doing what you want. This is a good read about the workflow https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/what-makes-a-good-repl.html https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/what-makes-a-good-repl.... Here's a talk I co-presented last year that discusses an application my team works on and the specific benefits we found from using Clojure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IekPZpfbdaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IekPZpfbdaI