Regarding your latter thoughts: You're right in many ways that whilst bikeshedding about a 'better' language, we end up stuck with the old language that no-one

Regarding your latter thoughts: You're right in many ways that whilst bikeshedding about a 'better' language, we end up stuck with the old language that no-one really wants. The issue is, people are never going to agree. Your post implies that Clojure is more worth while than Scala. Personally, Scala's type system makes it far more valuable to me than Clojure, so I lean the other way. Trying to get a consensus, even just in the world of JVM-compatible languages, is intractable. People individually need to choose their languages, and choose them carefully. If you don't have control over the language you work in, consider changing job.