But it's also the case that some programming communities are huge but not very intelligent. At the risk of indulging in a cliche, I'll point to the reputation t

But it's also the case that some programming communities are huge but not very intelligent. At the risk of indulging in a cliche, I'll point to the reputation that PHP had for many years, and which it still somewhat has. This was a community that was, for a long time, dominated by WordPress programmers who engaged in every possible worst practice and anti-pattern. You could, in a sense, get work done in PHP. But you didn't necessarily learn a lot while you were in that community. I mostly wrote PHP from 1999 to 2009. I got a lot done. I had fun. But it is a language that if you try to go fast, you automatically end up with sloppiness. More than most languages, the entropy sets in fast, the tech debt piles up unless you invest incredible effort to fight back against it. Ruby was better, and the Ruby community was much more intelligent, but in every Rails project I worked on, once it grew past a certain point, me and my team started having endless debates about "How should we refactor these fat models?" When I started writing Clojure, one thing that surprised me as how easy it was to avoid tech debt. Writing short functions comes naturally and without effort. Simply getting away from for() loops and using better aggregation structures cleans up the code in astonishing ways. The thoughtfulness and universalness of the seq interface impressed me in 2010 as much as the PHP "array" flexibility had impressed me in 2000. It was an obvious step forward. You could say I'm taking easy shots by focusing on PHP, but I could say some of the same things about Ruby. Handing blocks to iteration methods is better and cleaner than the ambitious confusion of the PHP array structure, but it still is not as clean or universal as what Clojure achieved with seq. And as Zach Tellman has said, it's a rare language where you can just scan a file and the syntax of the language tells you so much about the structure of the code. EDN has been designed with an unusual thoughtfulness.