I would probably lean towards Clojure, because of your Java experience, its library advantages, active community and the usefulness of other JVM communities. Ho

I would probably lean towards Clojure, because of your Java experience, its library advantages, active community and the usefulness of other JVM communities. However, a tradeoff to keep in mind is that currently it often has unhelpful exception error messages. Googling for "ncurses java" provided better results than "ncurses clojure". It is useful to exploit Java's libraries, only wrapping them in Clojure when there is something to be gained. (Like writing a macro mini-language to automate away tedious parts of a library you use.) I find that when using a new program (in this case, a programming language), it helps to quickly test that it basically supports the features I'll want. So if I had your requirements, I might check early on whether I liked one of the ncurses libraries.