I had barely touched java, and last time I really did was something like 1.2, but I love clojure for any free time work I do. Stuff like Lein helps hide a lot of the painful parts of the java ecosystem (it even has plugins to build .war files for web deployments if you don't need to heavily configure your web.xml file, as well as hiding class path fun during development). There are also emacs clojure modes/etc and paredit works as well.