Perhaps a better title would be "Complete beginner web apps in Clojure less secure than complete beginner web apps in other environments." (EDIT: Isn't security a perfect example of a place where (good tech + good community) > (miracle tech + bad community)?)

This brings to mind an incident, about which I'll say: While I do find that the community is friendly and a source of satisfying discussion in person, the Clojure community online is notably less beginner friendly than other language communities. (tl;dr - Attempts to "help" newbs that are really opportunities to be a language weenie considered harmful.)

I find some parallels with the Smalltalk community, which had a reputation for an "ivory tower" attitude and a "Not Invented Here" snobbishness. When I was a beginner in Smalltalk, a coworker of mine had written a nice but arbitrary little DSL specification language using Array literals and symbols. So I made some sort of comment about the syntax she'd created, and which prompted a knee-jerk reaction about how Smalltalk had a small non-ALGOL syntax -- as if I were totally unfamiliar with Smalltalk syntax.

I've had experiences like this asking about the arbitrary function definition-like syntax of Compojure web application routes. Those look somewhat like function definitions, but they're really macros. I had tried for some time to Google the answer, but no one had ever posted about the exact code to do what I wanted. (Which wasn't at all abstruse. Something like getting access to the entire request map while modifying the returned session.) Well, it turned out that all I needed to know was to not refer to the request as

[request]

but as:

request

But instead, I got people hounding me on IRC, saying "It's all made out of functions" - with what struck me as an almost cult-like zeal - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYTkSFRmKzM#t=5 One individual snidely comments he'd put me on "ignore" and others kept telling me to go read the source code, and how wonderful that it was all made out of functions, and how wonderful it would be once I finally understood. Well, I told them that I did understand that, and that "everything being functions" had little direct bearing on what I was asking about. I am reminded of how Smalltalkers got a chip on their shoulder from the circumstance of Smalltalk's significant differences from mainstream. (Me included, I am afraid.)

Just what kind of community treats with newcomers by assuming that the newcomers are lying and then telling them to go read Lisp macros? Also, this is only the most easily related situation I've encountered while interacting with the Clojure community. There have been others.

No non-algol patterned language has ever gained more than a niche acceptance. If Clojure doesn't want to commit long term mindshare suicide, some attention needs to be paid to avoiding inadvertent hostility to newcomers. (This includes unintentionally being a bad security-defaults minefield.) Smalltalkers had the same "read the source" knee-jerk. In the end, it didn't work out so well. Care needs to be taken to understand exactly what the newbs are asking, because they know the least about how to formulate the question. Also, if you find yourself running a simplistic "pattern match" head-daemon eagerly looking for opportunities to bedazzle the newb with your wonderful, superior, and different way of doing things, just stop. You are giving your community a "weenie" reputation and your mental energies are better used elsewhere.