Wrangling Clojure Stacktraces

From OO to Clojure Workshop!
Watch my free workshop to help you learn Clojure faster and shift your paradigm to functional.
Clojure error messages and stacktraces are the number one most complained-about feature of Clojure. I agree they're bad. There are many levels of abstraction that the problem can exist in. For instance, it could be a reader error (syntax error), a type error (expecting a different type), an argument order/number error, etc. I wish I had a nice analysis showing you how to identify each type of error. But I don't!
What I do have is a bunch of resources. As a major problem in the Clojure language, rest assured that a lot of energy is spent on it. There are blog posts, stack overflow questions, utilities, and major work in the language. Here are some resources:
How To Understand Clojure Stacktraces And Error Messages
Christopher Bui has written a nice guide for beginners.
Clojure Stack Traces for the Uninitiated
Connor Mendenhall gives some beginner tips for reading stacktraces.
Prone
Prone is a cool middleware for Ring applications that catch exceptions and give them to you with a nice UI in the browser. It's one of the first things I add when starting a new web project.
clj-stacktrace
This older library prints stacktraces in a better way. Clojure functions
are converted to their namespace/name
format instead of their
canonical JVM name with dollar signs, and things are aligned to be more
easily read.
Clojure Error Message Catalog
This is a project to document error messages in Clojure with their interpretations and solutions. It is similar to the Elm version.
clojure.spec
clojure.spec, due out in Clojure 1.9, promises to make a lot of error messages much better. A lot of the difficulty with error messages in Clojure is that there are macros (yet another layer of abstraction). clojure.spec gives you a way to parse macros (and other syntax) with much better error messages.
For a preview of how spec will help, check out Illuminated Macros and Improving Clojure's Error Messages with Grammars, which came out before spec but use similar solutions.
Conclusion
With spec, I am very optimistic about Clojure error messages. In the next five years, I can see them getting really good. In the meantime, Clojure error messages are just something you'll have to learn how to read.
I wish I could wave a wand and give you all of the experience needed to read error messages. Error messages are a problem in many languages and Clojure's follow that tradition :)
If you're interested in learning Clojure, don't be discouraged by the error message. Nor should the JVM scare you off. That's why I created the JVM Fundamentals for Clojure course. It's over five hours of video teaching lots of things from my experience with the JVM that I still use with Clojure.