Language design requires tradeoffs: the power of a feature, vs. how much more complex it makes the language to read/learn/etc. Making something easy to use doesn't commit one to anti-intellectualism; it just shifts the field of intellectual challenge elsewhere.
See Yegge's Perl essays[1] for examples of core-language features that are 'powerful' but problematic; hopefully that convinces you that at least the form of argument is legitimate. It could be that those Perl features are bad whereas transducers are great. I happen to share some skepticism of transducers because they overly-resemble existing features (partial application) and can be implemented pretty easy with existing Clojure tools. Also the marquee use case (sharing transformations between sequences and channels) so far seems exceedingly rare to me, though maybe things are moving in a direction where that's more important.
> And like you said, if you don't understand it you don't have to use it.
True to an extent, but (a) the high prominence given to the feature may well lead to a situation where you can't read other peoples' code without learning the concept, and (b) it's easy to create transducers by accident.
See Yegge's Perl essays[1] for examples of core-language features that are 'powerful' but problematic; hopefully that convinces you that at least the form of argument is legitimate. It could be that those Perl features are bad whereas transducers are great. I happen to share some skepticism of transducers because they overly-resemble existing features (partial application) and can be implemented pretty easy with existing Clojure tools. Also the marquee use case (sharing transformations between sequences and channels) so far seems exceedingly rare to me, though maybe things are moving in a direction where that's more important.
> And like you said, if you don't understand it you don't have to use it.
True to an extent, but (a) the high prominence given to the feature may well lead to a situation where you can't read other peoples' code without learning the concept, and (b) it's easy to create transducers by accident.
[1] e.g. ".." in https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ancient-languages-...