> It was created because Hickey needed a language to solve problems he was having in his specific arena (delivering concurrent applications in the Java ecosyste

> It was created because Hickey needed a language to solve problems he was having in his specific arena (delivering concurrent applications in the Java ecosystem with his consultancy) and not really to improve on the Lisp state-of-the-art side of things. It's true that Clojure isn't trying to be SBCL, but you're mischaracterising what Clojure is designed to do. Clojure is based around the idea that good code minimises interconnections. In Clojure parlance, "complex" code is code that is very interconnected, and "simple" code has few interconnections. Clojure is designed to make it easy to write "simple" code. CL programmers tend to look at Clojure and say "Why should I use Clojure when CL is more powerful?", but Clojure isn't trying to be more powerful than SBCL, because sometimes adding power means sacrificing simplicity. Clojure is an insufficient CL, but CL is an insufficient Clojure.