Lisp-style languages give you homoiconicity and macros which allow you to build complex abstractions. For example you can write (with-resource x (do....)) where

Lisp-style languages give you homoiconicity and macros which allow you to build complex abstractions. For example you can write (with-resource x (do....)) where with-resource handles resource allocation and cleanup. That particular example can of course be done with decorators in Python or blocks in Ruby but lisp macros go further by letting you rewrite code at compile time. Clojure itself has better solutions to common shared-state concurrency patterns than other lisps (and most languages in general!): efficient persistent data structures, STM, various atomic reference types, etc. And of course running on the JVM has many benefits: performance via the excellent JIT and GC, high quality libraries, great development and operations tools, and so on.