Good stuff; resonates with the reasons I've stayed away entirely. How much time have you invested in checking out Clojure? The Clojure community while a bit small is fairly hot. If you find the learning curve intimidating, but haven't taken much time to dig in, give it maybe 10 solid hours and I think you'll love it. The syntax is a tiny bit off-putting at first for a non-Lisper, but once it clicks, it clicks HARD.

As I got into it, I discovered that I have to hold myself back from getting too crazy too quickly. It's just that easy.

I do love it. I've spent enough time with it to build a couple of toy web services and found it great.

Only issue was trying to learn emacs so I could use paredit. Later I gave that up and used something with vim.

It's probably the number one language I would like to spend time with.

Also, I'm usually not much for these kind of exercises, but this helped me a lot with the syntax: https://www.4clojure.com/

I got a lot out of Clojure koans, myself. Rich Hickey's talks are also phenomenal. I'm itching to take a crack at designing a service around Datomic.

Emacs Live is a pretty legit pre-baked environment for use with Clojure, and pretty sexy to boot, decent themes (but needs a Solarized one.) It's also preconfigured to play nice with lein via CIDER nrepl for that "live hacking" experience. There are still a few tricks, and it's a little heavy, but it's quite good for a packaged toolkit. I definitely feel the advantages over Vim, for Clojure at least.

Sadly, I too find myself unable to set aside the time I'd like to for Clojure.

Again, really enjoyed the article!