> and dynamic languages more broadly (e.g. Python/Ruby)

[sigh]

It's a sign of the times when HN posters say "dynamic languages" and manage to ignore the Elder Language, the language from whence all dynamic languages sprung. And that language is...

From a practical perspective, Clojure is pretty close to Python in day to day usage. The largest difference to adapt to for me (and a couple others that I worked with), was the absence of the imperative-style for loop/yield keyword combination in Python. To get something similar, you tend to need to rewrite into something with lazy-seq/loop+recur. Everything else (for work doing web development, data processing, and internal API development) is pretty close with favorable points to each depending on the task.

If you were already writing pure functions in python and then creating data flows using generator expressions or list comprehensions, moving to Clojure is very natural. If you aren't, and if your job is to move bits from one place to another performing transformations along the way, you were already having issues in Python and might want to consider the approach regardless of the particular language employed.

I really want to learn Clojure, but somehow my brain refuses to engage with Lisp-style syntax. I just cannot read it at all.

Groovy is perfect for me, because it has a familiar syntax, but it allows me to do much more in a much more readable way than Java would.

> Groovy can fill a different role even if your go-to language is Clojure. Groovy is great for writing non-lispy DSLs

You can just stick the required syntax atop Clojure, using parsers and macro forms. For an example, see my https://github.com/gavingroovygrover/grojure

What's needed is a Groovy-like syntax atop Clojure to get the best of both worlds: Clojure's power and Groovy's readability.