[andyfingerhut]

To each their own, but in answer to your question "why would anyone in their right might settle for that?", where I am guessing you meant "right mind", one reason is because of the huge collection of Java libraries (and libraries written in other languages that run on the JVM) that can be easily called from Clojure. There are also some software deployment environments where the code must run on the JVM, or it is not considered for deployment, and Clojure can play well there.

Clojure on the JVM starts up in about a second with only the core Clojure code included. It can definitely take in the tens of seconds to read/compile-to-JVM-byte-code step for larger code bases that are not precompiled from source, but for long-running server processes, many people consider that a blip compared to VM startup times.

Of course that _is_ an issue for quick-running command line tools, and most people therefore don't use Clojure on the JVM for those purposes. Many _do_ use ClojureScript running on a JavaScript engine like node for such things, because its startup time is lower.