2) Clojure has sensible math with auto promotion to bignums, you don't have to worry about overflows like in Java.

3) You don't pay the price for the JVM startup time when running unit tests. When developing Clojure you have a JVM active at all time for your REPL. The JVM startup time is really only a problem if you want to write scripts.

Your first issue with Haskell is a plus! Everyone in #Haskell on freenode are incredibly helpful, and well, if they're all professors you likely to get some quality help, right?