Actually, Clojure improves the "Java experience" by quite a bit. As an example, leiningen as a build tool is quite usable, and it doesn't take much work to get

Actually, Clojure improves the "Java experience" by quite a bit. As an example, leiningen as a build tool is quite usable, and it doesn't take much work to get a working (yes, also from the command line) application. As for the JVM "just breaking", I can't agree with that. The JVM is an impressive piece of engineering and I'm very glad I can make use of it in Clojure, rather than deal with half-baked attempts at building yet another VM (reference counting, anyone?).