The JVM is a blessing and a curse. I believe it was a very good decision and that Clojure wouldn't have become as useful or popular as it is without it, because

The JVM is a blessing and a curse. I believe it was a very good decision and that Clojure wouldn't have become as useful or popular as it is without it, because it provided immediate and quick access to a huge ecosystem, allowing it to be productive and useful right away. But its also hindering further adoption and may be part of what caused a bit of a decline in interest, which for an already niche language, doesn't help. Many people are turned off the JVM. I personally don't mind it and I love Clojure, but even I have been wondering whether I should port some services to something else because I've had to use larger cloud instances for them simply due to memory requirements... Maybe I can run them on node with Clojurescript instead, I'll have to investigate that, but I think I'll lose out on a ton of libraries that I use that rely on the JVM. Hmm.