IMO it depends on the lens through which you're looking. If "Clojure" in that sentence to you means the language and the features, then no, popularity is clearl

IMO it depends on the lens through which you're looking. If "Clojure" in that sentence to you means the language and the features, then no, popularity is clearly not an innovative feature and is basically orthogonal. It obviously doesn't matter how popular the language is if what we're talking about is whether it supports <language feature x>. However, if "Clojure" in that sentence is interpreted in a wider, more general and necessarily less concrete sense -- to represent the language, ecosystem, branding, etc -- good marketing/advertising, community management, and general operations-level can be rife with places to innovate. An excellent language that never gets adopted has effectively zero value IMHO until it's corpse is ransacked by a language that does get adopted. People rediscover things that older languages have done all the while almost every week it seems -- creating a language and the requisite community to actually drive adoption can be considered innovative if the rest of the rest of the landscape is sufficiently similar. Clearly the Clojure project is doing something differently from the Common Lisp/Scheme/Racket crowd.