This is one of the areas of programming language conversations that fascinates me. The area where differences in how people think bubble to the surface.

"It's harder to understand at first, often un-intuitive"

I always felt that way about VIM. With programming languages, 'the lisp way' has always been the best expression of how I usually think about solving problems.

My brain naturally gravitates towards solution that involve macros, recursion etc. I can remember the first time I came across Common Lisp's condition system- my brain immediately went- 'this is so much more logical than exceptions in java/smalltalk etc'.

I know people who find Haskell's pattern matching and guards completely foreign but are entirely at home with switch/case and if/else whereas to me they seem very close to one another.

"Clojure (and possibly other Lisps) feels kind of like Vim to me."

Which is ironic because they keep suggesting to learn Emacs alongside Clojure and other Lisps!

"They"? VimClojure seems to be pretty popular. Most people who use Clojure and Emacs combined already used Emacs for other Lisp programming projects before, so it definitely depends on the direction you're coming from. Java refugees tend to stick to Eclipse.

The real irony is that there's barely any distinction between vim and emacs. The "editor wars" included a lot of size arguments, but with the rising popularity of vim as the de facto default vi (and increasing memory capacity), this is a pretty moot point. Vi have become ze enemy.

(The number of people who stick to a smaller vi is probably the same as uemacs users)

I am kind of feeling the same way about this. I find myself asking...If I dove head first into this what would be my ROI??