I disagree with regard to Clojure. IME, the fact that it's a lisp doesn't seem as hard for noobs to grasp as immutability by default, or pickup up the functional programming mindset. We usually go for folks who use Emacs, so they may already have an indoctrination.

When you compare Clojure to other lisps, I think you'd agree it's more discriminable, given the plethora of literals that dont use parenthesis: vectors [1 2 3] sets #{1 2 3} maps {:key "value" :name "Bryan"}

I've used clojure for some weekend hacking and have found that the biggest challenge is feeling like my code is non-optimal. I can get stuff to work and could build real stuff in clojure, but I hesitate because I feel that it's not necessarily idiomatic.

I guess I need a clojure mentor for the first non-trivial project. There really isn't that much idiomatic web-related code out there to read, and with clojure there is also quite a lot of variation in how systems get designed (b/c of the power and expressiveness available).

This is not an excuse, just noting the factor that has turned out to slow me down. If i had more leisure time I'd just power through and build stuff until I arrived (through trial and error) at my own sense of best-practices / design tradeoffs. That has yet to happen but will someday.