Gimme a general purpose language that has a REPL. Not that crippled, useless garbage that most non-lisp languages have (typed or whatever).

What makes Clojure awesome - it's the REPL. Everything else is secondary.

And any criticism of Clojure just falls apart once you get to the power of the REPL. That alone could make you undeniably productive.

- Make it work - Make it right - Make it fast. In that order!

And Clojure is a language designed to build programs in that order.