Libraries are heavily influenced by the semantics of the language they're written in / designed for. It's quite easy to see this in the Clojure community today,

Libraries are heavily influenced by the semantics of the language they're written in / designed for. It's quite easy to see this in the Clojure community today, by Java libraries are good from the clojure perspective. The goodness of a java library has little to do with syntax (because clojure can easily call any java library), but semantics. For instance, java commonly uses mutable state. A fundamental principle of Clojure is that data should be immutable. Immutability makes testing easier, it makes parallelization easier. Clojure was built to make pmap easy. If I have a java library where I have to remember that Foos are thread-safe, but Bars are not, that adds to the incidental complexity of my solution, and reduces my ability to bring Clojure's new tools to bear on the problem. As another commenter pointed out, syntax of a language is heavily influenced by the semantics of the language. A language starts with a few high level principles, and a favorite hammer or two. The syntax of the language is designed around making those common operations easy. Libraries written in that language will tend to follow those same principles. Having Java libraries available to Clojure is a huge advantage, but it's not the be-all end-all, because the semantics of those libraries may be incompatible with your new language. Instead, focus on semantics. Figure out which high level principles are good. What abstractions and design principles result in better, easier to understand solutions? From that follows your libraries and syntax.