Don't worry, you won't need to dig into Java world. And to be honest, the Java world is pretty good when you compare it to some other more fashionable alternati

Don't worry, you won't need to dig into Java world. And to be honest, the Java world is pretty good when you compare it to some other more fashionable alternatives. After you spend some time with Clojure, it will become very obvious which Java libraries are good and which frameworks are bad (pun intended ;)). And again, the likelihood you'll need to do this is very low. Many good and useful Java libraries already have Clojure wrappers or pure Clojure alternatives. The comparison of the need to write C/C++ when using node.js/PHP/python/Ruby is a good one. It almost never happens unless you're doing something very specialized. And better still, the Clojure case is better than many other languages/platforms because via Clojure you can go low-level from Clojure itself (deftype, unsynchronized mutable, etc) without writing any Java code. Again, the cases where you need such low level constructs are very few and far between. Writing your own in-memory data structures comes to mind.