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.