I can hardly write a correct Hello World in Java. I can read it, I can probably write it, but I've never really used it.
Yet I've been writing Clojure daily for the last 9 years.
This means that you really don't need Java in order to use Clojure.
Coming from a C++ background, I used to dislike the JVM out of principle just like yourself, especially since it needs to run on my local machine and it uses so much memory and is slow to start up.
However, once your app is started, you're in the REPL and that's the only time you need to start your app.. You can keep developing for days without restarting your app once.
Once I finished developing my app and I deploy it to a server, I'm kind of happy it runs on the JVM - that thing is super tuned, very fast and runs on a myriad of hardware platforms.. I don't have to spend one minute thinking about those details.
So while the JVM is somewhat inconvenient on the dev machine, it helps a lot when you deploy it to production.
Things became a lot simpler when I stopped worrying about it and just used the language for its power and beauty.
This means that you really don't need Java in order to use Clojure.
Coming from a C++ background, I used to dislike the JVM out of principle just like yourself, especially since it needs to run on my local machine and it uses so much memory and is slow to start up.
However, once your app is started, you're in the REPL and that's the only time you need to start your app.. You can keep developing for days without restarting your app once.
Once I finished developing my app and I deploy it to a server, I'm kind of happy it runs on the JVM - that thing is super tuned, very fast and runs on a myriad of hardware platforms.. I don't have to spend one minute thinking about those details.
So while the JVM is somewhat inconvenient on the dev machine, it helps a lot when you deploy it to production.
Things became a lot simpler when I stopped worrying about it and just used the language for its power and beauty.
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