> As much as I love Clojure, it's still a harrowing language for beginners to learn and use

I have worked with several people for whom Clojure was the very first PL they have learned and they were very successful. One thing is nice about Clojure: it stays consistent - the idioms, data structures, conventions don't suddenly change. In most other languages - you pick up a framework, you try to learn it and it feels like you are learning a whole new language.

Yes, Clojure can be very intimidating and confusing for the beginners but its learning curve is not steeper than of Java's, Ruby's or Python's.