Yeah, most of incidental complexity vanished away once I start using clojure. Lisp is pretty cool in that there is very little to learn in way of syntax and ceremony.

If you are new to functional programming, I suggest understanding reduce well. Understanding it forms the basis of higher order functions. Also half of clojure core is implemented with reduce.

Also, I highly suggest watching the talk “simple made easy”. One hour of time spent there pays off in many many months/years