I had never programmed a line of Java before starting to use Clojure, so I'll try telling you my perspective.
Clojure is carefully designed to be a certain kind of simple. It does this by making good use of the bounded parametricity ideas Rich Hickey got from Haskell. For instance, many, many objects implement the Seq protocol and thus there are many, many functions which can operate on them. This is a different kind of orthogonal and division of concerns than Java seems to use (in fact, writing Java/Clojure interfaces is hard, not because there's any sort of data conversion or calling convention trouble, just because the Java ideas feel terribly clunky in a Clojure program).
You also get the usual functional/lisp benefits from Clojure. Declarative style (accentuated by some lazy semantics), higher order looping constructs, homoiconicity and macros.
Clojure isn't my favorite language, but it sits at a pretty neat spot in the design tradeoff. It also has a very vibrant community of smart people, which may or may not be a direct consequence of it being a JVM Lisp.
Clojure is carefully designed to be a certain kind of simple. It does this by making good use of the bounded parametricity ideas Rich Hickey got from Haskell. For instance, many, many objects implement the Seq protocol and thus there are many, many functions which can operate on them. This is a different kind of orthogonal and division of concerns than Java seems to use (in fact, writing Java/Clojure interfaces is hard, not because there's any sort of data conversion or calling convention trouble, just because the Java ideas feel terribly clunky in a Clojure program).
You also get the usual functional/lisp benefits from Clojure. Declarative style (accentuated by some lazy semantics), higher order looping constructs, homoiconicity and macros.
Clojure isn't my favorite language, but it sits at a pretty neat spot in the design tradeoff. It also has a very vibrant community of smart people, which may or may not be a direct consequence of it being a JVM Lisp.