I am a CL guy, I find the Java stuff in Clojure quite frustrating. This is not because of any deficiencies in Clojure (it is much better than writing straight J

I am a CL guy, I find the Java stuff in Clojure quite frustrating. This is not because of any deficiencies in Clojure (it is much better than writing straight Java code). The problem is that it is (comparatively) so hard to do anything in Java, and a lot of the object hierarchies and interfaces in the Java libraries are overly complex. But you can write macros and end up with a pretty nice DSL out of even an ugly Java library. You also have to know all of the basic Java stuff, knowing about how to configure the classpath and how classes basically work in Java are key. It is good to know the various Java build tools as well.