It's the thinking and core idea of Lisp that is great, not the implementation. Every implementation includes tradeoffs, hacks and compromises. Clojure's succes

It's the thinking and core idea of Lisp that is great, not the implementation. Every implementation includes tradeoffs, hacks and compromises. Clojure's success is largely due to the fact that they've made a set of tradeoffs, hacks, and compromises that makes it usable in a lot of business contexts. Running on the JVM means giving up some really core Lisp ideas (like tail call elimination) but it also means that you can distribute a JAR file and nobody will know you didn't write it in Enterprise SafeAndTrustworthy Java. We don't keep needing different variants, we keep needing different implementations.