I will try to continue your clay/sticks parable, but in my limited clojure experience, you seldom create a clay model, it resembles more a creation of a custom clay brick-set.
Most of the time, all of the team is either building bricks or using those bricks.
The biggest plus of using clay instead of sticks is that when you find yourself in a corner, it is easy to invent a new brick shape that fits.
The drawback is, that without the style-guide, you can easily end up with brick-shape per developer. But I see a difference between "Hey, why did you invent a new brick type again?" and "Apply one finger of pressure when doing joins."
When crisis comes and model needs to pivot urgently, there are two possibilities. Either you just need to rearrange your bricks. Or you realize there is something fundamentally wrong with your bricks, and then you create a new brick-type and carefully replace old bricks with new bricks.
Ok, programming parables are weird. I might write a more concrete example, if I have time.
Nice extension! Feels right too, clojure does feel a lot like passing around similar clay bricks. When all the bricks line up, it's kind of like Lego?
The analogy also opens up another difference. In clojure, you often end up passing around a lot of maps with string keys. What are those keys exactly? You have to crack open the clay brick to take a look at how it works. With the stick model, you can often see how the sticks work if the bundle of sticks has been color coded nicely - eg, well constructed generics. Luckily cracking open a Clojure brick is as simple as ctrl-clicking, so it's not nearly as bad as it sounds!
Programming parables are definitely weird though - programming does not have true analogies with the real world. It's more of a superset of the real world and the use of programming languages is more akin to defining physical laws than building bridges with clay or sticks. I don't think we as humans have really come to understand exactly what we are unlocking with the development of programming and how vast it really is.
Most of the time, all of the team is either building bricks or using those bricks.
The biggest plus of using clay instead of sticks is that when you find yourself in a corner, it is easy to invent a new brick shape that fits.
The drawback is, that without the style-guide, you can easily end up with brick-shape per developer. But I see a difference between "Hey, why did you invent a new brick type again?" and "Apply one finger of pressure when doing joins."
When crisis comes and model needs to pivot urgently, there are two possibilities. Either you just need to rearrange your bricks. Or you realize there is something fundamentally wrong with your bricks, and then you create a new brick-type and carefully replace old bricks with new bricks.
Ok, programming parables are weird. I might write a more concrete example, if I have time.