Clojure is *NOT* an acceptable Lisp

Clojure revolts me.

It is the most explicit to date abandonment of the age-old Lispers' Dream, which was "Lisp All The Way Down." Clojure is the antithesis of the Lisp Machine. Rather than a crystalline pyramid of comprehensible mutually-interlocking concepts, behind every Clojure primitive there lurks Black Magic. The Clojure user who is missing some routine or other will run crying to Java for help, rather than implementing the feature himself correctly - that is, as a natural part of the entire language, built on the same concepts. Clojure pisses on everything I've ever loved about Lisp. It rejects even what little consistency and intellectual rigor there is to be found in an abomination like Common Lisp.

Clojure is the False Lisp, which Reeketh of the Cube Farm.

I don't care if everybody really is more productive in Clojure than in Common Lisp. The latter is not my standard of comparison (Symbolics Genera, the state of the art, is. Or, if you want something that is distinctly inferior but is currently available on the market: Mathematica.) Clojure is the gutted corpse of a dream.

I am tired of this abomination being hailed as the future of Lisp. Users of real Lisps, such as myself, will keep hoping, dreaming, and working on systems which do not betray the original virtues of the language.

Pretty much everything I've built over the last decade has run on the JVM so languages that don't integrate with that stack are out of the question for me. The interop allows me to mix languages and to slowly migrate codebases from one language to another, where appropriate.

I like Lisps but their previous inability to interop closely with other work I've been doing has prevented me from adopting them (similarly Haskell is very appealing but without full interop with Java, it's not useful to me). Clojure finally provides that interop in a Lisp, and does so in a very interesting and high performance way.

Perhaps most importantly, Clojure is based on the idea of immutable data, making concurrent programming much easier / safer.