My little brain can't keep up with too many things (in short term memory) at once, so more concise and expressive languages are better for me. Also, more sane languages are better (where it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot because you're not (yet) very good at the language).
The homoiconicity of Lisps allow me to think less about syntax. (function <args...>). And reading code is easier, since I see the operations first. Adding more advanced features (via macros) can give you lovely function chaining - threading, piping, etc.
Immutability in Clojure is also good for me because it allows me to learn and forget about functions. Black boxes are great things when you can trust that they are pure functions; just compose bigger black boxes and so on.
I don't do a lot of Clojure these days, but when I was using it professionally I could basically forget about JVM; JDBC was about the only time I interop-ed with Java. If you need some of the good things that JVM offers, great; if not, it's just a hosting environment. Same with Elixir and BEAM (although JVM and BEAM are very different and tailored for different problem sets).
But on topic, given a choice between ReasonML and JavaScript, it seems to me that ReasonML is more thought out, cleaner, safer, and a step in the right direction.
My little brain can't keep up with too many things either, which is why I only use statically typed languages.
Dynamically typed languages force me to keep type information in my head, and that's just not a good use of my brain when the compiler can be so much better than me at this.
I don't want to take a side in the dynamic vs static typing debate, specially since my favourite languages are Common Lisp and OCaml and it would be difficult for me to choose either, but I wouldn't say your argument of having to keep everything on the head holds if we consider the whole array of dynamic language offerings.
Compared to toys like Perl, Ruby, Python, etc., proper dynamic languages (Lisp, Smalltalk) have state of the art debuggers, browsing and discoverability tools and let you backtrack, experiment and tweak your program in an iterative fashion. They are indeed "little brain" friendly and the development experience matches or surpasses those of compilers and classical IDEs.
I am so much more productive in LispWorks than, say, IntelliJ+Java it isn't even funny.
The homoiconicity of Lisps allow me to think less about syntax. (function <args...>). And reading code is easier, since I see the operations first. Adding more advanced features (via macros) can give you lovely function chaining - threading, piping, etc.
Immutability in Clojure is also good for me because it allows me to learn and forget about functions. Black boxes are great things when you can trust that they are pure functions; just compose bigger black boxes and so on.
I don't do a lot of Clojure these days, but when I was using it professionally I could basically forget about JVM; JDBC was about the only time I interop-ed with Java. If you need some of the good things that JVM offers, great; if not, it's just a hosting environment. Same with Elixir and BEAM (although JVM and BEAM are very different and tailored for different problem sets).
But on topic, given a choice between ReasonML and JavaScript, it seems to me that ReasonML is more thought out, cleaner, safer, and a step in the right direction.