I think you should separate the concepts of Java (the language) and the JVM in your mind while making your decision. You can absolutely write Clojure without to

I think you should separate the concepts of Java (the language) and the JVM in your mind while making your decision. You can absolutely write Clojure without touching Java, but at some point if your app scales you are going to have to understand optimizing and tuning the JVM, that being said, it's no different than optimizing and tuning the underlying OS (from a conceptual standpoint), it just happens to be a virtual run-time. You are not writing Java to tune the JVM as most of it is set by parameters and config files. If you are dead set on no JVM there is always ClojureScript. For reference I have worked in Clojure, CL and a little Scheme, but would not claim to be an expert in the latter two. From my experience Clojure is a LISP built for building user centric apps, where many of the others are an assortment of projects of people scratching their itch. Some good, some bad, some complete and documented, some not. They are very powerful, but seem to have less stewardship to keep the project on focus to be a dev platform for building holistic applications for businesses. while it gets linked to a lot in discussions like this, it's worth noting the following article: http://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html http://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html That is very much what CL and Scheme felt like to me. Also to note, I have never worked with any of the commercial offerings for CL, so take my opinion on the matter with the grain of salt that my exposure to them has been limited to open source offerings.