I've been debating whether or not to give a talk / write a blog post on this, but I think this might just be the kind of thing that people make their assumption

I've been debating whether or not to give a talk / write a blog post on this, but I think this might just be the kind of thing that people make their assumptions about, and thats it. I do wish people would give clojure a real go, not just running a toy program, but taking the time to setup a REPL in clojure and clojurescript, learn about sending commands from the editor directly into the REPL, etc. The reasons for choosing clojure are un-obvious at first glance. Moving from Java -> Ruby for example is something that you feel immediately. People understand in < 5 mins why ruby might be a better fit for a number of solutions then Java. I don't dig clojure because it's a LISP, or it's homoiconic, or because of most of the academic ideas here in this thread. I picked clojure because with it, I get clojure and clojurescript. With clojure I get to target all java libraries, great concurrency primitives, the ability to live code a running system, the ability to experiment extremely quickly due to the REPL based workflow, now with spec/generative testing, I get better testing then I had before, with writing fewer tests. I get systems are often easier to reason about or debug. There's rarely a ton of libraries to do a single thing. Existing libraries don't change much. We launched our first service in clojure 1.6, we've never had to do anything but bump the version number. No breakage. With clojurescript we get just as many benefits. CLJS gives us access to all javascript libraries that have been written, Re-Frame/Om Next are incredible frameworks on top of react, figwheel allows us to never (rarely actually) have to refresh a page when doing layout / css things. Because we have access to a running REPL we can change the state of the app via function, allowing for way rigamarole when trying to test out inputs, etc. devcards lets you look at all the state of your widgets on the page + figwheel means you can see how CSS changes will affect all the states of your widget at once. Synchronicity between the two languages allows us to write .cljc files where share functions and schemas can exist, so your backend and front end are pointing to the same place for critical things that should be shared. It's really really different, but it's really really great. If you're a professional in the field, you owe it to yourself to just try it out and see if it helps you save time and be more productive.