Agreed, regarding the effort required to compete on completeness. However, somewhere in between “fad language of the week” and “let’s use nothing but C, because

Agreed, regarding the effort required to compete on completeness. However, somewhere in between “fad language of the week” and “let’s use nothing but C, because nothing will ever compete” I do think there’s room for new languages. I’m old enough to remember a time when Java and JavaScript didn’t exist. They, for better or worse, climbed Mt. Improbable to become widespread. Ditto Python. I’d sure love to believe that a better set of languages could also climb that mountain. Clojure has certainly gotten a leg up by grafting itself onto Java’s ecosystem, but as you point out, there are sacrifices (stack traces, and inability to support things like TCO for two). Ultimately, I’d love to see a combination of two things happen: - More libraries that work across all implementations of Clojure - At least one or two implementations of Clojure where the mismatch between the host platform and Clojure is minimized to useful effect. On the last point, I’d love to see Clojure hosted on Common Lisp. I don’t hold much hope for this given the toxic reaction that many Common Lispers have for Clojure, but I can see benefits in both directions. For Clojurists, CL has the benefit of running in lots of different contexts with some useful performance characteristics in some cases (SBCL, I’m looking at you). I also believe a Clojure-on-CL implementation would have the possibility of good stack traces. For Common Lisp, rather than Clojure just being a mindshare theif, pure-Clojure libraries would become usable to the CL community. Sadly, I think we’ve already achieved peak collaboration between the Clojure and CL communities. The people who liked what Clojure was about already enthusiastically left, and the remainder seem to mostly harbor sour grapes.