I've worked at two different Clojure companies now. My take is that yes, Clojure is strictly better than, say, Python. It is strictly worse than Common Lisp.

I've worked at two different Clojure companies now. My take is that yes, Clojure is strictly better than, say, Python. It is strictly worse than Common Lisp. A lot of stupid BS just goes away when you're not papering over an underlying runtime. Yet, the Common Lisp community has struggled with what I'll genteely call "ergonomics of modern development"; i.e, the language contortions to do some boring normal things, particularly around hashmaps, are a PITA. Clojure addresses that nicely. However, if a serious startup went into Common Lisp, those things would be addressed internally in a few months (hopefully they'd release the library). The angle where Clojure really wins is access to JVM libraries. Just, no contest. Clojure as a hiring strategy is strategically problematic. It's niche, a lot of people won't know it, and some really smart people will do some gnarly hacks for your company starting out. The implication is that later on, you have to unwind the hacks, new people have to go through a deconfusion period, and the smart people will move on leaving you with gnarly code to untangle. I do not expect this to be different for Common Lisp companies. Would I build a team on Common Lisp? Yes, but I would not plan it in such a fashion that I would expect the team to get large, or for the entire company to have to interact with their codebase. I'd apply similar calculus to Clojure, I just don't think its as good as CL. If I really needed the JVM libraries, I'd be doing the project in Scala. Too, if I really needed a strong reliable software pipeline, I'd be doing the project in a strongly typed non-dynamic language: Scala, Rust would be my preferred goto languages.