The summary:

- Any serious codebase is going to exceed the complexity you can hold in your mind at one time

- Once that happens, it's crucial that you can reason about the part you are focusing on

- Interactions between components are MUCH harder to reason about if they share mutable data

- It's possible to design cleanly isolated components in any language

- But we found that Clojure makes it natural to write concise, testable and isolated code

- So much so that writing sloppy/badly designed systems _feels awkward_ in Clojure

- For us, that was more beneficial than a book full of patterns or best practices

- YMMV, but I'd try it out and be sure to get over any aversion to Lisp before passing judgement

edited for formatting