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Clojure has many pleasant properties, but it’s painfully immature to a seasoned Lisp developer. That said, if I really wanted to use the JVM for business reasons, Clojure would be high on the list. Even so my gut instinct is ABCL.

Edit: response to child: The most obvious thing is a lack of TCO. But there are plenty of other things like the limitations of a JVM based object system compared to the MOP. And then there’s the Lisp Machine heritage that shows through in forms like EVAl-WHEN. There’s the condition/restart system too. That’s just a few things off the top of my head. But in no way am I denigrating Clojure. It’s a good Lisp that meets important needs and I’d happily use it anytime it’s right tool.



I don’t think TCO is a big deal, Clojure has loop-recur when you need it


That's self recursion (Lisp has a low-level Go To as a building block).

TCO is a bit more general. Any tail call then is just a kind of jump.


As an honest question from one who learned clojure but never CL, could you expand?


I like Clojure okay, but it lacks the deep support for highly-interactive programming that I prefer. I've written fairly extensively about that subject in other posts and elsewhere.

To be fair, that kind of support is hard to come by outside Common Lisp and Smalltalk.

I miss Common Lisp when working in Clojure, but not vice versa. Clojurescript with figwheel is a pretty nice, pretty interactive way to develop web apps, though.




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