Clojure is a Lisp for the JVM. I don’t normally like Lisps - the code tends to feel cluttered, and the libraries are scattered and difficult to penetrate. Whilst in Python you’d perform a ‘import string’, in PLT Scheme you’d have to ‘(require (lib "string.ss" "srfi" "13"))’.

Clojure solves that by having a small, functional core, and farming everything else out to Java. It works surprisingly well, and the code ends up looking rather clean. It’s rather similar to Arc in style; with short function names, a small core, and liberal amounts of simple syntax sugar. Where Clojure differs is it’s more functional style, it’s advanced concurrency primitives, and it’s integration with the Java.