Thank you for sharing your valuable experience. Please read the following lines with as much kindness in the tone as you can imagine, they might seem a bit hars

Thank you for sharing your valuable experience. Please read the following lines with as much kindness in the tone as you can imagine, they might seem a bit harsh at times - nothing personal was intended. With great power comes great responsibility. The things you describe all seem like a problem of inheriting a code base written by people without much organizational discipline ("was a mess") or working with people ("Relying on other programmers to be consistent and coherent in their naming"), that don't have a coding discipline. Such things should be caught in a code review or perhaps cleared at the design stage. How do you want to work with people, that are not able to communicate their intents clearly to a human? How do these people "talk" to the computer through their code, are they partially guessing the "correct" code? Are these programmers perhaps producing a mess independent of the codebase or language? I am really sorry for you, it must have been hell. I know Clojure(Script) isn't the silver bullet many people make it out to be. The programmer still has to be quite competent and quite disciplined at times but Clojure can and will support you - that is my experience. I have seen my fair share of stuff, professional programmers with two decades of experience that couldn't use a profiler and would dismiss clearly debugged issues, where they initially pointed fingers at the database and the network. It is quite easy to end up in such a state of incompetence - you don't do very demanding stuff or do the same stuff all over again for 20 years and then comes the advanced problem, you are under pressure, because the deadline has slipped again for a year and you are totally lost in the reflection hell you have created. I have other similar experiences with "professional" programming. Our CTO Pavel has a number of good war stories about static types, avoiding static types and problems created by OOP (classes are types too in my book) too. Well, some libraries could use better documentation. So could Java, Python ... libraries. The point in Clojure is, you often can just read the whole function because it is like 10 lines of code or the whole library that often isn't that long either (200 lines of code isn't that uncommon). There are core developer on Slack basically every day, so you should be able to catch them and answer questions more or less quickly. And yes, I have had my fair share of problems with libraries too, you can check on Slack if you want - so I sat myself down and have rewritten the part that I needed more in line of our code. It is more robust as it has checks specific to our use case and we have one less dependency we would only use for 10% of its code. In general, I think Clojure is a great language. It is very powerful and can be a chalange to wield without any kind of insightful guidance. Once you have crossed the initial steps though, you will probably surpass the productivity of most other languages even in a largish team.