Good stack traces are about the maturity of the compiler and tool support- they have absolutely nothing to do with clarity of the language. Clojure is simple and Clojure opts for explicit context over implicit context almost everywhere (dynamic binding being a big exception)- this is exactly what Linus argues for. All you have in Clojure are functions and values - how much straightforward can you get? No objects, no hidden behaviors, no private variables, everything in namespaces, etc.
After two years of hacking on Clojure, I haven't really found macros to obfuscate anything. But that's because I learned not to use them unless I need them.
But, yeah, I'm looking forward to the community growing and providing better error messages and tools for deciphering raw Clojure stacktraces.
You're looking at Clojure from the point of view the language specified by the docs though, and I'd agree as far as that goes.
From another point of view, Clojure, like all higher level languages, is just an abstraction over an underlying machine. From this angle and in it's current state it's (IMO) a pretty leaky abstraction.
I think it's fair to say that this has more to do with the implementation than the design though.
C is just an abstraction over the underlying machine. The amount of tooling to required to make C programming bearable is staggering - how much leakier can you be?
Good stack traces are about the maturity of the compiler and tool support- they have absolutely nothing to do with clarity of the language. Clojure is simple and Clojure opts for explicit context over implicit context almost everywhere (dynamic binding being a big exception)- this is exactly what Linus argues for. All you have in Clojure are functions and values - how much straightforward can you get? No objects, no hidden behaviors, no private variables, everything in namespaces, etc.
After two years of hacking on Clojure, I haven't really found macros to obfuscate anything. But that's because I learned not to use them unless I need them.
But, yeah, I'm looking forward to the community growing and providing better error messages and tools for deciphering raw Clojure stacktraces.