Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In fact, if I see someone using binary operators in languages such as Java,JS,Ruby etc... I'll immediately consider it bad code, regardless of context - it's just not the right tool for the level of abstraction in these languages. Clojure is written in java (and clojure). It uses bit operations to implement Software Transactional Memory and persistent collections. Is it a bad code? You seem to think a programmer sh…
I don't know enough about Clojure, but I think you are saying that Clojure itself is using bit operations behind the hood - of course it's ok for a language implementation to use bit operations. But if any of your Java code for applications or libraries used bit operations, I'll call it bad code.
But if a standard library implementation is allowed to do something why can't I?