I've been working professionally with Clojure/Script for about six years now and I don't regret it. I also work on TypeScript when I have to. Here are a few suggestions I have:

> - The debugger sucks

In my experience, Cursive/IntelliJ is the most mature editor setup for Clojure. It includes a step-by-step debugger but I don't really use it. Not because it doesn't work, but because there are other ways of debugging that also work, as explained below.

> - There are other tools for debugging like Portal and Flowstorm, but they involve already knowing what the problem was so you can instrument the function and call it with the same arguments
> - Java stack traces make the above very hard to do.

If I don't know where the problem is, I'll look at the Java stack trace and start adding `tap>` calls to see the flow of data. Since Clojure programs are data-oriented, inspecting the state that's flowing through the function arguments is usually all that's needed. It's a bit different process, though. Can you elaborate on your issues with the Java stack traces?

Here's a relevant comment from Alex Miller: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/80al23/how_do_i_do...

> - You're a second class citizen if you don't use emacs. [...]

This doesn't really ring true for me even if a lot of docs are written for emacs. At work people use vim, emacs, VSCode, and IntelliJ. As I alluded to earlier, I think IntelliJ is the one that "just works". If you haven't tried it, I recommend giving it a shot. Personally, I've never been a fan of the "Clojure for the Brave and True" book because learning Clojure and emacs at the same time is a BAD IDEA, and it gives a false impression that emacs is somehow necessary when it isn't.

> - Complaining about Javascript and React and then having your whole ecosystem wrap around Javascript and React is really obnoxious. Reagent is falling behind in React versions and it's missing out on performance enhancements. If you need to do niche React things, it's a pain in the ass.

Reagent works with React 18, function components, Suspense, React.lazy, hydrateRoot, etc... Honest question: what do you feel like you're missing out on right now by using Reagent? IMO, concerns about Reagent's performance are overblown. I don't think most apps suffer from this issue, they suffer from complexity. The Reagent/Re-frame API is the same as it was when I built my first app with it six years ago and the core model is still solid. One critical thing I do think is missing is SSR integration. I recently started a library to work on this: https://github.com/rads/rain

Here are some thoughts from the creator of Helix (successor to Reagent): https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/11uluj4/comment/jc...

> - This might just be me, but I used Citrus with Rum and I found it to be the most over abstracted thing I've ever seen in my life. I know it was inspired by re-frame, so maybe re-frame is the same. But it's like Redux X10 in terms of verbosity.

I haven't used Citrus with Rum, but I think Reagent/Re-frame is worth checking out. You're probably going to have a better experience because it's a more mature stack. If you find Re-frame too much, the Reagent ratoms still work and are as simple as it gets for state management.

> - Call me crazy, but the Java/Script interop is worse than other guest languages because there's huge impedance mismatch between functional and OOP.

> - There are very popular broken libraries. People say "It's okay if a library hasn't been updated in 6 years, because Clojure is so stable!." This is a total myth, there have been several flat out broken libraries being recommended in tutorials.

Can you share what libraries you're talking about and/or what issues you ran into?

> - While people are working on frameworks (Biff, Fulcro), there are no "best choices" for a lot of problems yet and it leads to frustration just trying to make a simple crud app.

In my opinion, Biff is the future for server-side apps. It works really well out-of-the-box and the pieces are there to improve it over time. After using om.next and getting burned by it, I haven't had much interest in Fulcro.

> The community hasn't been unfriendly or unhelpful, but sometimes it feels like I'm speaking to aliens.

I'd recommend the Clojurians Slack for support. Hit me up there (@rads) if you decide to give Clojure another shot and want some help working through some of the issues you mentioned.