My Increasing Frustration with Clojure
Clojure is a language for people who know what they are doing by people who know what they are doing.<p>If you&#x27;re giving sequences to the set functions, you either (A) don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re doing or (B) have yet to discover that clojure.set is not what you want.<p>Set union can&#x27;t be done efficiently on arbitrarily sized sequences. At least one of the two arguments needs to offer fast set membership; ideally the larger one, hence the requirement that all arguments be actual sets. If you have sequences, you need to make an explicit decision to pay the cost of indexing (eg. via set or into functions) or you need custom code for your use case.<p>Sure, static or dynamic enforcement could help catch silly errors here, but then the author goes and poo poos on &quot;greenfield&quot; development of things like spec, despite the fact that would &quot;fix the bug&quot; exactly as requested by throwing when you gave non-sets to the set functions.<p>I&#x27;ve followed a lot of the discussion around the supposedly horrible way the Clojure community is run. So far, the absolutely only complaint that I can sympathize with is that communication could be faster, clearer, and softer. Alex Miller has made dramatic strides in improving this, but he&#x27;s just one man. Cut these guys some slack, they work crazy hard to build and shepherd something awesome for free.