> I think that Clojure's concurrency primitives (various reference types, immutable data structures) are a bit too advanced. While newbies rarely need referenc

> I think that Clojure's concurrency primitives (various reference types, immutable data structures) are a bit too advanced. While newbies rarely need reference types (other than var, of course), I don't think there's anything particularly "advanced" about immutable data structures. Considering that most people learn math before they learn programming, immutable data might even be an easier concept to grasp for a complete newbie than imperative programming with mutable data is. You might think immutability is advanced but that's most likely because you learned to program with mutable things initially. As an aside, I agree that Clojure's stack traces are pretty bad, but there are tools that improve the mess quite a bit, eg. clj-stacktrace. The stacktraces might not be quite as intractable to newbies if you integrate that into the REPL.