I appreciate your sharing your experiences. But don't give up just because you struggle with Clojure. That's certainly not a sign that you're not good enough fo

I appreciate your sharing your experiences. But don't give up just because you struggle with Clojure. That's certainly not a sign that you're not good enough for this profession, especially if you have 15 years of C++ experience! Is the problem that you struggle with how to solve problems in a functional style? I can imagine that Clojure might be a tough place to start for learning FP, even though you don't have to worry about a type system such as in an FP language like Haskell. What really helped me understand functional programming (in the lispy sense, not the Haskell sense) was the free book "How to Design Programs" http://www.htdp.org/ http://www.htdp.org/ This book taught me, for instance, how to break down problems into small blocks that use recursion, and how to compose those blocks together. There's also a second edition that seems to be significantly more streamlined (which is probably more appropriate, given your existing experience with programming), but I haven't used it: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ In the end, if you can make things that solve problems, that's what really matters. :) Consider a language like Clojure as another tool. There's no requirement that you use it.