For me, it comes from a few things, none of which are unique to Clojure or necessarily from the language itself. I use reagent, re-frame and shadow-cljs and use

For me, it comes from a few things, none of which are unique to Clojure or necessarily from the language itself. I use reagent, re-frame and shadow-cljs and use the REPL very infrequently in clojurescript: 1. Reagent provides a much simpler and stable abstraction that js react does. Almost all my reagent views today look exactly the same as they did six years ago, while react has went through a number of API shifts. I barely noticed the switch to hooks, for example, the only place where it mattered to me is with interop with native react components and that was rather minimal. My reagent views are typically extremely simple with no logic, except when needed for performance optimisation. 2. I use live reload (figwheel in the past, shadow-cljs now) to auto update my changes. I use reframe-10x to inspect my state. 3. Re-frame gives me the application structure and let’s me write reusable code easily. Clojure’s immutable data structures make this pleasant and safe (I don’t really need to think about what could be mutating what outside of interop, but the same can be done in js with a re-frame-like framework and a little discipline) and the sequence abstraction is a natural way of dealing with collections of data for me. These things make clojurescript react development very productive and pleasurable for me. But like I said, none of these things are actually unique to Clojure. > I can't memorize all thousands of functions to manipulate lists and hashs in clojure I mean, that’s just part of learning any language or framework and takes time and hands on coding. When I started with Clojure I would regularly just browse the clojuredocs reference pages to remind me what exists. After a while you stop having to look them up. This is no different from learning any function library really, except that if you’re using an OO language with good tooling or static types your autocomplete might be able to better predict what is relevant to you. After years of using Clojure, I rarely need to look functions up, which is similar to how after years of C++ I don’t use autocomplete to find functions (I use it just to save time typing, not to find what the function might be). I dunno how long you spent with Clojure but it sounds to me that maybe you didn’t spend long enough to get comfortable enough to see any productivity boosts? Clojure isn’t an easy language to learn so it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect to see productivity right away. It’s also not everybodies things, so maybe it just didn’t click with you.