There's no reason to avoid the JVM ecosystem just because you don't like Java, especially if you've never done enough Java to develop a strong and well-founded hatred for its verbosity and excessive emphasis on mutability rather than for its unfamiliar object system and static typing, which tends to be what people starting with Java seem to dislike.

You can start to use Clojure effectively without ever importing a Java library. (Even without java.lang.*, although that gets implicitly imported anyhow). The rest, you can pick up as you go. It's not too bad.

I already have an overly healthy dose of self-loathing since I'm mainly programming in PHP. I guess that's why I'm mostly staying away from Java ;-)

And thanks for the further insight on Clozure!

Java libraries are nice and all, but I could sure do without java.lang.StackOverflowError.

I recently started learning Clojure and was floored when I found out it lacked tail-call optimization. I thought that was pretty much a requirement for a functional language. I understand that it's a limitation of the JVM and that there are workarounds, but they all seem kinda hacky, so I don't really plan to use recursion a whole lot in Clojure. On the other hand, its libraries for building and processing collections are so good that I don't think I will really need to.

No car, cdr, or cons is just weird though, for a language that's considered a Lisp.