Depends on the tooling you use and how you program.

An REPL that is integrated with your editor is key.

A good linter such as clj-kondo (comes with Calva on VSCode), helps a lot to avoid typing errors and a lot more.

Using a REPL middleware which visualizes your output such as portal is very nice.

One issue is when you get errors that involve anonymous closures. It might be harder to navigate those errors. But I don't know of a language that does this well. Clojure makes it very easy to divide and conquer though.

Another big one involves macros. Macros are powerful, but errors you get from them can be quite cryptic in some cases. Usually for common macros there are linter rules that you can use/find to avoid those.

Clojure itself has a symbiotic relationship with nils. However as soon as you interact with Java data structures you might run into exceptions here. It's something to be wary of.

Finally, spec and malli give you tools to adorn your code with little specifications to state your assumptions and guarantees. You can automatically run those while you're writing code to get sharp, human readable error messages.

So yes, Clojure error messages can be scary/confusing at times, even though it has gotten better. But there are a lot of things you can do, or have been done for you that really help here and sometimes go quite a bit beyond of what you'd expect from a more mainstream language.

It's sad to hear this is still an issue.

For those who don't know, Clojure's error messages... aren't. They take the form of a stack trace from the compiler's internals, and that whole stack trace just gets barfed out onto the terminal. There's an exception message but it sometimes just isn't that helpful.

I know there was an effort a while back to improve the situation, but last I saw (2019) I believe things were only marginally improved. It's a shame because other than that it's really quite a fantastic language.

Isn't that true in most common languages? Python and Ruby and Java and Go (panics) will all spit out the stacktrace?

This is about compile-time errors, not runtime errors.

Clojure spits out Java stack trace if you make syntax error. It's equivalent of Python barfing segfault when you put tab in the wrong place.

This doesn't happen with the normal REPL (or invoking with clj -X) after a couple of first examples that came to mind:

  user=> (defn foo [[a b] (+ a b))
  Syntax error reading source at (REPL:14:26).
  Unmatched delimiter: )
  user=> (defn foo [a b] a/b)
  Syntax error compiling at (REPL:1:1).
  No such namespace: a
  user=>

It will give you a stack trace of the compiler when asked following a syntax error though, with a disclaimer not to confuse it with your own code:

  user=> (pst)
  Note: The following stack trace applies to the reader or   compiler, your code was not executed.
  CompilerException Syntax error compiling at (1:1). #:clojure.error{:phase :compile-syntax-check, :line 1, :column 1, :source "NO_SOURCE_PATH"}
 clojure.lang.Compiler.analyze (Compiler.java:6808)
 clojure.lang.Compiler.analyze (Compiler.java:6745)
  [...]

Possibly you were using tooling that always tried to present the stack trace without discerning between kinds of evaluation errors?

That does look considerably better than what I used to see.

Tbh I think they've actually gotten worse in recent years. This thing where the compiler spits out a stacktrace to /tmp and makes you go and cat it? Absolutely awful.

And the move to spec, ugh, UGH. I have wasted so much of my life looking at spec errors for (e.g.) namespace declarations and being completely unable to tell what was wrong. I don't know how to fix this, unfortunately.

Oh god, right. I largely switched to Kotlin in 2019 so I didn't get a lot of exposure to that, but your comment is bringing it all back...

When I was learning Clojure, I just sorta dealt with it. Usually you are presented with a trace that contains a line number for the error which was enough. I’m not entirely sure what could be done about the error messages but with experience and more idiomatic usage it’s infrequent for me to get stuck on these (and when I do I just step through it in the debugger).