I've worked with large Java applications and large Closure applications. The effectiveness of the tooling in clojure, in particular Emacs and nREPL-based tooling, makes local and remote programming and debugging, even in production miles better than anything I experienced in Java. I don't remember how it was when I started, but as an expert user (the only case I particularly care about), nothing I've tried except Common Lisp approaches Clojure.

I guess all we can do is provide our individual datapoints. From my experience, I find it much easier to do so with Clojure. Systems generally last longer, almost never need refactoring, accumulate a lot less tech dept, and easily accommodate future requirements when written in Clojure as opposed to Java. I come from a team who has a 50/50 set of systems in java and clojure, been the case for 3 years. Team size averages around 8 devs.

Tooling in Clojure is actually pretty great. Generative testing, linters and IDEs I find work better then in Java personally.

Where I agree with you is learning curve. Clojure is definitly difficult for new users to pick up. The community and core team I think are more focused on improving that now then ever though. So hopefully it'll change. Also, I'm not sure hostile is a good word, if anything, the best part about Clojure is the community is actually really nice, helpful and supportive, even to new users. There's no trolls, and a lot of great open dialogue, active members ready to help you on chat and forums at all times, etc.

As an aside: which linter do you use? Been looking for one.

I always have my projects setup to use Kibit and Eastwood.

And depending on my editor, I might use Joker for syntax checking as I type. Cursive has pretty good inbuilt linting too.

True, but I don’t need most of the those tools. Static analysis is most useful when working on large teams. When 3 or 4 people are working on a project, it is mostly unnecessary. I’m not saying error messages are not useful, or static analysis isn’t, they are, but not as much as people are thinking here(wrt clojure)

There is 3-5x difference in productivity between java and clojure most of the time, just because I don’t have to read a lot of code to make a change. Clojure, written right, feels like math equation on a board. My eyes don’t dart around up and down figuring out the code. It is terse, to the point and immutable.

It is subjective, but clojure vs Java is like doing math with Arabic numerals vs doing them with Roman numerals. I’m sure we need lot more help when doing math with Roman numerals, but that level of help is simply not necessary, and is more about the medium than the message