I definitely agree that it's really a great, mind-opening experience for developers to learn a LISP and a functional statically typed language. I feel like you might be missing some things about Clojure here, but I'm too inexpert at it to really fill you in. Anecdotally, I find that when I'm faced with a problem in Clojure, I spend a lot of time thinking about what to do, but rarely spend much time actually writing or modifying code. In Scala, I feel like the type system and more familiar syntax (just because of my own experience) lets me just dig in, but I probably do more actual editing/typing/work. I basically really like both languages, even though both have their annoyances and rough edges, and I wish I could use them both at work - Clojure for when it made sense, and Scala the rest of the time.