CL has had ABCL and Parenscript to integrate with Java and JavaScript fairly nicely for a long time, so I don't see why Clojure having the same abilities should

CL has had ABCL and Parenscript to integrate with Java and JavaScript fairly nicely for a long time, so I don't see why Clojure having the same abilities should be the primary driver of success, except maybe long term. Clojure piggy-banking off of Maven definitely helps though. To me it was more about finding a nice middle ground of immutability that is better than most language's defaults and not as strict as Haskell, having nice lazy sequence-oriented abilities to do data processing, and offering a fresh syntax to traditional Lisp code, even if it's arguable whether it's "better", with that syntax having nice (and normal wrt other modern languages) data literals for vectors and maps out of the box. In other words I would have tried it and probably liked it without all the JVM stuff, I think it hooks a lot of people for similar reasons (i.e. its actual features, not just its runtime platform), and the JVM integration just adds momentum and can propel it into enterprise situations that traditionally reject anything that's not Java or C++. CL has even more great features, but it's not able to draw new users just because of the "hip new thing" status languages like Clojure have enjoyed because it's so old, and if you have native deployment available chances are you're going to use it and not always consider a JVM option, which in turn leads to never taking Lisp into the enterprise world.