[ndonolli]

Depending on your IDE, you could use different tools to provide the intellisense-like functionality for clojure. For Jetbrains, there is Cursive, for emacs, Cider, etc. I won't disagree that the beginning experience can be lacking even when coming from Java - for instance a good coding environment also includes setting up a hosted repl, but the extra effort does pay off in being able to code interactively as your program runs.

The lack of type checking is due to the entirely different paradigm that Clojure is built around. There are many benefits to it, but I can understand the frustration if you expect to use the language in a way that goes against that, especially when dealing with the interop layers. The fact that it is built upon the JVM is powerful but it's not necessarily an easy language switching from a language like Java.