In my mind Clojure is an easy win unless you're writing short running things that need to boot fast (though you could consider clojurescript + node

In my mind Clojure is an easy win unless you're writing short running things that need to boot fast (though you could consider clojurescript + node for that). Both languages have good support for concurrency, but for me Clojure has much more going for it: - It's fast, and has all the tooling and libraries from the JVM - it has immutable datastructures with literals for all of them) by default, this is huge, they're probably the thing I miss most when I have to use other languages. - It encourages functional programming very strongly, but has excellent support for managing mutable state when you need it. - It's very simple (it's a lisp) and has a very small number of primitives, with much of the standard library coming from macros rather than actually being baked into the language. - The community is amazing, #clojure on freenode is incredibly helpful and friendly towards noobs. I probably don't sell it well, but I'd highly recommend watching some of Rich Hickey's talks to sort of understand the philosphy that goes into Clojure: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic... Don't go for Go just because it's familiar ;)