> this should not actually reflect poorly on Clojure as a language.
Why not? If a language's goal is to be practical (as is Clojure's), then it should take practical concerns into consideration. This is something that the Java community definitely gets right.
Because someone who has never heard of map/reduce/filter/partial will need to do some studying to leverage the spine of the language in order to make living, breathing code-organisms.
God forbid someone would have to learn how to use map, reduce and filter - 3 functions present in Ruby, Python, Javascript, PHP, Erlang, Scala and many others.
Why not? If a language's goal is to be practical (as is Clojure's), then it should take practical concerns into consideration. This is something that the Java community definitely gets right.