&gt; Any competent Clojure programmer would likely have known most of the Clojure core functions by heart<p>I really like Clojure, but I&#x27;ve always found the relatively huge set of core functions to be a major barrier to entry. I always have this nagging feeling of &quot;there&#x27;s probably a core function I&#x27;m missing to make doing this or that easier&quot;, and end up spending a lot of time poring over documentation instead of just programming. Maybe that&#x27;s just how it is, and the answer is to push through it until you know the functions better, but there&#x27;s something to be said for shipping a language with fewer, simpler, more primitive operations.