I had the same experience. Spent over an hour trying to strap all the components into a working system just for it to trow error after error. So I gave up learn

I had the same experience. Spent over an hour trying to strap all the components into a working system just for it to trow error after error. So I gave up learning Clojure and instead went into Pharo. Self-contained environment trivial to set-up, same live environment typical of lisps, but approached from the Smalltalk side. I enjoy it.