Thanks for the advice! I sent a similar e-mail to this list two years ago then got distracted with school, work, etc. I've since found the time and motivation to get back into it.
I am indeed a software developer, but still a novice in many ways. My only experience in audio programming was making a synthesizer in PureData, but I want to be more fluent in C/C++ programming so I can work on making JACK clients.
Which leads me to my next question: are most JACK applications written in C/C++? I understand that programming as close to the hardware as possible is important for performance, but what about programming in a JVM language (I have Clojure in mind)? How reasonable is that?
-Kris