I think Clojure puts a similar amount of effort to Haskell in order to discourage mutable state: the core library makes the easy solutions the ones that use imm

I think Clojure puts a similar amount of effort to Haskell in order to discourage mutable state: the core library makes the easy solutions the ones that use immutable data structures and pure functions, and you have relatively ergonomic escape hatches (State/ST monad, atoms/volatiles/transients) available if you need them. Haskell's compile-time checking of purity and explicit effects is obviously absent from Clojure, but at a high level I think the two languages are mostly aligned in how easy they think it should be to use mutable state[0]. That being said, this is just picking nits and I agree with your larger point that Clojure and Haskell provide very different sets of trade-offs, so one really isn't a good substitute for the other[1]. [0] edit: Clojure just uses the more Clojure-y approach of eschewing compile-time checks in favor of assuming the user is able to responsibly use mutable state and indicate via some side-channel the contract a given function adheres to. Rich Hickey--if he cared about type systems in the first place--would likely argue that there's nothing inherent in Haskell which prevents programmers from writing truly labyrinthine stateful code by performing their computation within the appropriate monad; I have certainly done so myself, on occasion. [1] Unless your only metric is "ability to get functional programming weenies to argue/chatter in HN comments," in which case they pretty interchangeable IME.