Flamewar in the comments here... Just throwing in my 2c. I've been programming Clojure on the side for about a year now. It all started when I did the exercise

Flamewar in the comments here... Just throwing in my 2c. I've been programming Clojure on the side for about a year now. It all started when I did the exercises in the Clojure for the Brave and True-book, and also simultaneously picked up Emacs and Cider (a nice IDE indeed, and keyboard-based). Clj is just code like anything else. Anything you can do in Clojure you can do in Java. But with that language, I find myself creating things which I could not in other languages. Solutions come easier. Programs don't become long, but they get a lot done, and are performant. I dig it, and really recommend it to anyone who is bored with their day job.