I suppose the loops do help in the sense that looping in Clojure tends to favour using higher level abstractions. I don't think I've ever used while, I use dose

I suppose the loops do help in the sense that looping in Clojure tends to favour using higher level abstractions. I don't think I've ever used while, I use doseq only for side-effects, for is for list comprehensions (or for when its more readable than map), but most of my looping is actually through map, reduce, filter/remove, etc. So I suppose you're right because that is definitely less error prone than C-style for loops. So yeah, as you say, the higher level sequence abstractions definitely do help reduce errors in comparison to traditional loops. > how does i work? The language can handle the mutability internally, perhaps? That is, the user only sees immutability, but under the hood, the language maintains the state mutably. But I guess that's just an optimisation over recursion since the end-users code looks the same as if it were recursive. Kinda like 'reduce'.