I was really drawn to the title of your post because that's just what I have done--well, over the last few months--and I went with Clojure. I want to absolutely focus now and I can see the momentum is gonna take me for at least the next 10 years. I never rode the Rails train and after becoming a functional programming believer I'm kinda glad I didn't in retrospect, but I had always been envious of people who did make that decision to become good at a stack. I agree with you that the error exploding in Clojure is not nice, but to me it makes up for it in being on top of both Java and JavaScript (having been a JS dev previously, but being entirely tired of the convulsion of frameworks and build tools and module systems.)
It's a lisp that, as opposed to Lisp and Scheme, is not fragmented and seems to have mostly a healthy, united community. I see amazingly smart people, and so many of them, pushing Clojure forward (Rich Hickey, Stuart Sierra, David Nolen, Chas Emerick to name a few) and yet it's more approachable than Haskell. And I think these people will eventually find good, standardized solutions for things like the awfully ugly stacktraces.
Clojure doesn't really have a 'framework', and I like it that it's really composable in that sense. But things like Ring and Compojure are lightweight no-brainers, much like Rails is a heavyweight no-brainer for Ruby. What I want to say is, unlike JavaScript, after having picked Clojure as the language, the choice of everything else is mostly always a no-brainer (e.g. leiningen, core.async, enlive/hiccup, maybe Om soon.) And that really pleases my choice-avert brain.
I think this is a good assessment. I'm a little more bearish, though I love the language. I rode the Rails train in the past and recently embarked on a real web project with Compojure.
At first it felt like a very mixed bag. There are a number of reasonable if boring things that Rails provides that help make it easier to get your app production-ready––robust logging and asset compilation come to mind––that generally have to be hand-rolled in Compojure (as in microframeworks in other languages). More generally, there aren't many clear signposts from an architectural point of view––for example, there does not appear to be much community guidance over how to organize your namespaces, or how much code one should contain. We made some messes early on.
Once my partner and I got past the initial pain, however, we were extremely pleased with our choice. There are still times when I suspect Rails might have gotten us to market more quickly, but Clojure feels like a good ten-year choice. I certainly agree it's worth a second look.
Most welcome! I wrote that wall of text more in wanting to get my reasons out of my head, like you did, than in trying to wrestle you over to my side of the field. But if you want to be really tempted now, reconsider, like someone else commented here, the importance of concurrency and persistent data structures for web development going forward. Even for a one-man team (such as I plan to be, and actually one of my side-projects in Clojure has to do with language learning and SRS, would love to keep up with what you end up doing.) It means you can handle traffic spikes and trace errors as a one-man operation much more easily than if you had stateful bugs and failures to deal with.
It's a lisp that, as opposed to Lisp and Scheme, is not fragmented and seems to have mostly a healthy, united community. I see amazingly smart people, and so many of them, pushing Clojure forward (Rich Hickey, Stuart Sierra, David Nolen, Chas Emerick to name a few) and yet it's more approachable than Haskell. And I think these people will eventually find good, standardized solutions for things like the awfully ugly stacktraces.
Clojure doesn't really have a 'framework', and I like it that it's really composable in that sense. But things like Ring and Compojure are lightweight no-brainers, much like Rails is a heavyweight no-brainer for Ruby. What I want to say is, unlike JavaScript, after having picked Clojure as the language, the choice of everything else is mostly always a no-brainer (e.g. leiningen, core.async, enlive/hiccup, maybe Om soon.) And that really pleases my choice-avert brain.