I couldn't agree more. I'm not very knowledgeable on Java, but was blown away every time I looked to see the crazy amount of boilerplate to do anything. There are all these design patterns that seem to only exist because the language is so terrible. Thousands of people who aren't professional developers write millions of lines of Python each year (just a guess, but sounds right) and the vast majority just write code and don't need 50 classes in their application to do something.
You're talking about something different - Java the language is a bit ugly, but this is about JVM performance (ie, the runtime virtual machine that is installed to execute Java programs) with Clojure, where there is not much boilerplate to speak of.
Although the JVM is one of the sleekest environments around though and I'm confused by the fellow saying it is "viscerally slow". Clojure loads slowly, but after that everything happens at speed.
