i find boilerplate and attempts to protect me from myself to be the opposite of friendly. i also find jvm infrastructure to be less easy to deal with than the infrastructure that many other languages have.
i would replace 'friendliness of java' with 'breadth of support for'.
I really enjoy how I can look at the clojure code and easily see the flow of what I'm actually trying to do.
I would call allowing me to easily express what I want 'friendly'. I find lisps, smalltalk and their brethren to be friendly under my definition.
I know some authors recommend learning lisp as a first language because there are not a lot of syntax and you can focus on the important problems. However, from my experience, my university colleague hated lisp and prolog, preferred C++ and really liked C# and Java. Lots of them were pretty beginners or bad programmers, but still, you can't start somewhere and be already an expert.
So, hope it clarified what I mean by Java being friendly. And then, Clojure might be less friendly than java.. but still, in this mentality, might be more friendly than scheme .
plus, i hate managing memory when i don't have to.
if i still wrote stuff that had to snuggle up to the hardware, i would probably still be using c or c++ but, i'm not writing that type of code anymore so i don't have need to use c or c++.