I didn't say I couldn't understand them. I was talking about the amount of time it takes to understand a typical library in a language like Java. My experience is that you would have to spend a lot of time jumping through different classes, and often have to step through things in a debugger to understand them.
By contrast, I find that code in Clojure libraries to be much easier to read and understand. You literally needs orders of magnitude less code to solve same kinds of tasks, and it tends to be organized much better. I can open a namespace and read it top to bottom to see what it's doing. That's pretty much never the case with a non-trivial Java class.
As a concrete example consider the Java Flyway migrations library to the Clojure migratus library that I've taken over maintaining
They both provide same core functionality, and I was able to understand the Clojure version in a few hours. It would take me much longer to understand Flyway or to be meaningfully contribute to it.
By contrast, I find that code in Clojure libraries to be much easier to read and understand. You literally needs orders of magnitude less code to solve same kinds of tasks, and it tends to be organized much better. I can open a namespace and read it top to bottom to see what it's doing. That's pretty much never the case with a non-trivial Java class.
As a concrete example consider the Java Flyway migrations library to the Clojure migratus library that I've taken over maintaining
https://github.com/flyway/flyway/tree/master/flyway-core/src...
https://github.com/yogthos/migratus/tree/master/src/migratus
They both provide same core functionality, and I was able to understand the Clojure version in a few hours. It would take me much longer to understand Flyway or to be meaningfully contribute to it.