I've always been baffled by Clojure's view on state. It seems like just a rename of the concepts present in most languages today. Ie atom is mutable variable and value is an immutable value. What's the novelty here?
The sole fact that one has to reach over themselves and make a great deal to invoke it when thinking within Clojure's mechanics - they become neither cheap to mentally fiddle around with, nor actually implement within.
(FWIW, though, Clojure's novelty to me was an STM system that I could get up and running without a night's worth of tweaking, and otherwise fall safely into a great deal of attention if something were to go hilariously wrong - most of the other solutions around "back then" seemed to regard themselves as research curios lagging behind in fit and finish.)
