Best practices are there for one reason: because they were distilled by experience and consensus. You are definitely free to do away with them, but Clojure, being so terse, is especially prone to becoming an unmaintainable mess.

Plus, if there is on thing that Go brought to the programing practice, is that a boring formatting style that nobody really likes but is default for all code everywhere is a major win in readability.

> but Clojure, being so terse, is especially prone to becoming an unmaintainable mess.

Any programming language can be cryptic. Heck, you can write cryptic sentences in plain English. Clojure programmers usually (some sooner, some later) develop strong distaste to unmaintainable code. Rich Hickey talks about it in "Simple Made Easy" talk, which to Clojuristas is like a "Hail Mary" - everyone watch it at least once.

> You have to start developing sensibilities around entanglement. That's what you have to -- you have to have entanglement radar. You want to look at some software and say, uh! You know, not that I don't like the names you used or the shape of the code or there was a semicolon. That's also important too. But you want to start seeing complecting. You want to start seeing interconnections between things that could be independent. That's where you're going to get the most power.