Clojure is a really interesting and well designed language with bad error messages and bad official tooling. It feels very sloppy.
Compared to Go, it has a weak stdlib, is more memory intensive, and generally slower. You get beautifully concise code but it can be very hard to follow (or return to after time away).
Go can look completely idiotic or unbelievably focused and practical, depending on the light. It is painful to give up Clojure’s very strong selling points but I find alternatives to be more pragmatic.
"weak stdlib": You can use the Java ecosystem, most of the things you need are there
"it can be very hard to follow": I agree, if you are not a lisp developer it's really hard, but if you develop clojure everyday, it's as easy as anything else.
The answer is usually clean code when it comes to clojure. Keep your functions small.
"more memory intensive, and generally slower": yep, the JVM is more memory intensive than Go. No surprise there and Clojure adds up on top of that. Startup times are pretty slow too. But compared to python it's still fast. Apples to oranges.
I would say Clojure and Go are both great languages that tackle different problems so it's not a fair comparison.
Having projects that make significant usage of interop feels kind of gross, but I guess that is an option yeah. Pig-latin java is probably less fun to write than Go.
Regarding difficulty reading code, I'm not talking about syntax, I'm talking about the fact that many libraries define their own DSLs and you _cannot understand what they are doing_ by reading the code, you have to dig into the library internals to make sense of how they actually work, particularly when documentation is lacking or outdated.
Many problems can be solved by either language, and I wish it was easier to justify reaching for Clojure.
Compared to Go, it has a weak stdlib, is more memory intensive, and generally slower. You get beautifully concise code but it can be very hard to follow (or return to after time away).
Go can look completely idiotic or unbelievably focused and practical, depending on the light. It is painful to give up Clojure’s very strong selling points but I find alternatives to be more pragmatic.