Clojure is lisp on the JVM and it's certainly a plenty capable language/ecosystem. My exposure to lisp has been pretty minimal and limited to Scheme/Racket, but I've been told by some more serious lispers that clojure is the practical "getting things
done" lisp. Being on the JVM means it's fast but it's run time doesn't provide a new earth-shattering paradigm like beam does for Erlang. I think clojure exists to provide a solid runtime for people who know they want to write code in lisp and are choosing
a lisp dialect rather than a language.
This is not a knock against lisp by the way. I firmly believe every programmer should learn lisp, no exceptions. Lisp gives you such great perspective on every other language that even if you never actually use it for anything real taking a weekend to
learn the basics is more than worthwhile, but if you don't already swear by lisp I would skip over clojure until you do.
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Paul Mooring
Systems Engineer and Customer Advocate
www.opscode.com