[kaliszad]

Actually, Java, its syntax, the explicit types and how its often taught only obscure the solutions that could be much more obvious. Since I have seen Clojure, I was swearing why nobody has shown it to us right in the beginning when I was in the university. Back then, Clojure was already an established, stable language and that has been a decade. I could just skip the C, Java and other classes and would be a much better real-world problem solver/ engineer much earlier. If I needed the specifics e.g. for embedded or legacy applications, I could always look-up/ learn the details for C/ Java etc. but that is not needed for more than 95% of the tasks a software engineer would encounter in the real world.

[NOGDP]

You're not saying anything specific about what's wrong with Java. Java is not perfect, but you haven't actually given a single good reason. The type system alone is a huge benefit over languages such as Python/Ruby. Lisp has existed and been taught for a long time, and I like Lisp languages such as Clojure, but the allusion to Clojure being some kind of magic bullet is also pretty baseless.

[kaliszad]

Well, I did say at least 2 specific things (syntax, explicit types). But maybe approach this a bit differently and talk about what is great in Clojure that is not good in Java: - persistent datastructures that can easily be made transient in specific performance critical cases - consistent syntax - the language itself is a datastructure so manipulating of code is very easy and you have a serialization format (again EDN) basically for free - the REPL - most of the code transfers 1:1 to ClojureScript, that is not the case for Java and JavaScript which are completely different languages and have very different strengths - dynamic types, but out of the box type hinting is available for some corner cases where it improves performance/ makes interoperability a bit clearer and e.g. using clojure.spec you can with some effort make something approaching depend type systems/ very strong tests incl. generative testing - Clojure/ ClojureScript interoperability with the Java/ JavaScript ecosystem - developer productivity - actually performance especially compared to Python/ Perl/ Ruby, very carefully written Java would win microbenchmarks but in Clojure you can probably improve the overall performance of a large codebase because in the same time as you would need with Java you can do many, many iterations more and therefore explore the optimal solution - you can become very proficient in Clojure in about 6 - 12 months where with Java you probably need maybe 3-5x that time to tackle the same problem space

Yes, some of those things are not so specific to Java. If you only care about performance in micro-benchmarks Java would probably win but probably 95% of the problems in the real world are way more complex. Also, good luck writing correct multi-threaded code in Java vs Clojure. Clojure is uniquely positioned for multi-threaded workloads thanks to persistent datastructures, atoms, agents etc.