> Scala is more commonly written in a functional and/or streaming/reactive stle.
This is the exact opposite of my experience. All the Scala I've seen "in the wild" is basically Java with a slightly different syntax. All OO, with the odd high-level function thrown in to prove something I guess.
He clearly really cares about Clojure discouraging people from freeloading may be beneficial but a crummy tone may discourage people from adding value to Clojure which would be very unfortunate.
That's not what transducers are, though. They're a "recipe" for a function composite. I'm simplifying things, but transducers compose to form a function that then executes against each element in the collection passed in. The main difference is that no intermediary data collections are created. There's more, and it's worth reading up on them.
After ~18 years of Java I was feeling very burnt out. Initially it was the concurrency model and how it was being widely used. This itself drove me to find alternatives.
I started off knowing that Go, Scala, and Clojure (among others) offered cleaner abstractions on this. I figured I'd learn them a little and see where that took me - Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks was the book I first looked at.
It honestly didn't take long, but something with Clojure just clicked with me. Concurrency aside, the REPL experience and immutable data grabbed me and said "Keep learning this language!"
So I took an old game that I'd done in Java (with OpenGL bindings) and started rewriting it in Clojure. Loved the experience and kept working on any problems I could find to try out the functional approaches I was learning.
The punch-line is I fell in love with programming again. I was able to find my passion, to realize again why I went into this field. Slowly turned the career direction and now work full time with Clojure.
I've been making 2D games off and on for years. J2ME, Java w/OpenGL bindings, and now in Clojure. Was a great way to start learning a new language and since I love programming this is a nice way to a) do more, and b) practice, and c) is a completely different domain than the Clojure I do in my day job.
