Clojure is a mostly pure functional language, it is very uncommon to have almost all logic reach out to global variables to do work. It’s also rare to see multithreaded code that eschews most of the mechanisms built into the language for multithreading. These two things together (pure functional programming and strong concurrency primitives) are arguably the fundamental motivations behind the language. You value simplicity: Clojure can help make this code simpler. If there’s a succinct way to say that without the word idiomatic, one with fewer negative connotations, I will try to use that in the future.