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If you attempt to use edit/compile/restart method of development that most languages use, in the words of south park, "You're gonna have a bad time".

Clojure doesn't make it nearly clear enough that development needs to be performed interactively against a running instance of your application, with a REPL integrated into your editor. And yes tests run instantly when doing this.

Anything else is pure pain.

That indeed was a complete turn-off. I had it in five minutes. Also, I'm sort of done with the JVM - it seems to breed large, complex things that are hard to manage. If I want a Lisp, I'll install Emacs and SBCL - there's not much the JVM has to offer that makes it a must-have.

In Clojure, you do not need (and should not) restart JVM to run unit tests. You evaluate them (manually or automatically, from the prompt or a file) inside your REPL.

The instant feedback you get from Clojure repl driven development is light years ahead of Ruby. Try sticking to Clojure, you'll see the joy of testing. Stack traces are indeed ugly.