I've got really mixed feelings about Clojure. Like when I read Graham's book I went through a phase of "he wouldn't be fighting with nconc if he was using Clojure!" I find some algorithms to be easy and fun to write using persistent data structures and others maddening though if I did it more I'd get better at it. zippers are weirdly unergonomic because of some little bad choices. I badly wanted to do a project with the Clara rules engine but never got the chance.
As for GNU emacs I got over it. Like I was introduced to it in 1989, it was the cool new editor for the Unix world, one of my friends loved scripting with it. However I experienced it getting really janky about 20 years before other software got janky and I don't know why. Some of it might have been rot in things it depends on, like it used to be curses apps actually worked right but now they suffer data corruption from the telnet/ssh connection and always seem to have an off-by-one on the screen size. X Windows got glitchier. I guess emacs was ahead of its time, now people write janky apps with Electron -- like I have to type R E A L L Y : S L O W L Y when I use Slack at work. Photoshop is like that too, computers are 100x's of times faster so Photoshop should boot up faster than Momo Chiyoda can transform but no, it doesn't.
I switched to vim around 2003 as my emergency Unix editor because I could log into a busted system and start working and not have to rely on the package system (often the thing that was busted) to install emacs or build it from scratch. Helps that it doesn't use continuation characters so cut and past just works, there are lots of little things that make vim live more comfortably side by side with modern GUI life than emacs does.