I disagree with the author about the lack of market for a fast lisp, essentially a Go Lisp. Clojure's arguably greatest advantage, the JVM, is also a drawback.

I disagree with the author about the lack of market for a fast lisp, essentially a Go Lisp. Clojure's arguably greatest advantage, the JVM, is also a drawback. Think of how long it takes to start the JVM or how sluggish Eclipse is. I write Lisp primarily because it's the prettiest language and that it allows the greatest amount of freedom. What we need is a modern CL, inspired by modern dialects like Clojure and Arc, but with design decisions that allow for high performance, e.g. dynamic binding and static type inference. Some have pointed out that solid module support is also important for fast community growth. In other words, I'm arguing for a dialect that centers around the compiler, doing evaluation as a side-effect, perhaps through JIT compilation. The reason this has not been done, I believe, is not because it's impossibly hard (as some people have argued), but because it's a lot of work. Creating a necessary, good run-time from scratch is a large undertaking.