Just a side note, I thought it would be nice if instead of “you get the value on take” core async had a different semantics — “you get a value or exception is thrown”. I think it matches the JVM platform semantics better. It composes better in go blocks, i.e.:

(defn start-process! []
  (a/thread 
    ...start-a-process-that-might-throw))

(a/go 
  (try 
    (<! (start-process!))
    (catch Exception e
      ..do-something-else)))