Disclaimer: I personally prefer clojure, but earn most of my money as a consultant / coach helping clients develop Java code. For Java code, it's often easier

Disclaimer: I personally prefer clojure, but earn most of my money as a consultant / coach helping clients develop Java code. For Java code, it's often easier to predict the performance characteristics of a part of the code. But you shouldn't trust your judgements anyway - instead use a profiler - so this is not really a reason. Speaking of performance: I once talked to someone working for Elasticsearch, and they told me that they cannot use clojure for most of their code because of their performance requirements. Clojure collections are almost as fast as Java collections in many scenarios, but that is apparently not fast enough for them. This is probably not a valid reason for most projects, though. There is a huge number of Java developers out there, and Java is easier to learn for someone coming from C++ or C# or JavaScript than clojure (at least I am pretty sure about that). So hiring cheap developers might be easier if you use Java. You might count that one as a political statement. There are some great tools for Java out there: IntelliJ Idea, Yourkit Profiler, JRebel, ... Cursive Clojure is great, but IntelliJ for Java has even more integrated workflows. There are very mature open source libraries / frameworks / tools for Java: JUnit, Spring, Guice, Dropwizard, Gradle, Elasticsearch, ... You can have commercial support for many of them. Most of the libraries I use with clojure are version 0.3 or something like that with no possibility for commercial support (but they work fine anyway). Static typing: A lot of people complain about it, but it can really help you to create maintainable code. See for example http://talks.samirtalwar.com/use-your-type-system.html http://talks.samirtalwar.com/use-your-type-system.html