I haven’t used Clojure much in the last two years, but this is the part I remember is most surprising, and completely congruent with what Rich describes. You hear about this thing, it is a Lisp, and you wonder if it might be some edgy thing, moving fast, breaking things, showing off this mighty power (that Paul Graham wrote about) of Lisp.

And it is a little bit of that; but it's also a lot more of an intentionally conservative, even boring, extremely practical tool for building real things in a concise manner. In this way it fits into the Java ecosystem well, alongside many other very boring, robust, proven, reliable chunks of code.

Much of my work today is in the Node/NPM/JS ecosystem; although that has its advantages also, some days I really miss the boring reliable conservatism of Java and Clojure!