The hard part about Clojure is the editor tooling, like learning Paredit and how to evaluate code in the buffer. And then training yourself to actually do it.

It's similar to training someone to use Vim in that it's quite a different tooling set and workflow they're probably used to. I think that's the main barrier.

The language itself is pleasantly simple. And tools like Paredit make it one of the most pleasant languages to write. It's just hard for someone to appreciate Clojure until they put in the work to credentialize in its tooling.