"Astonishing" is exactly what I was thinking of as well. There's a lot of vitriol in this post. You say that you could go on and on and no one would care. Bu

"Astonishing" is exactly what I was thinking of as well. There's a lot of vitriol in this post. You say that you could go on and on and no one would care. But that's not true. If you list good, logical arguments against something, people will listen. Instead, there's an almost instinctive urge to rebel against your points solely because of your post's tone, which is antagonistic to what I assume is your goal. In my opinion, Clojure doesn't try to one-up Lisp. Rich Hickey recognizes the great value of Lisp and wants to share these features with a wider audience -- I can't say I would have ever taken an interest in Lisp if it weren't for Clojure in fact. Check out Clojure's rationale page (http://clojure.org/rationale http://clojure.org/rationale). Rich says he wanted a language that is: *A Lisp *for Functional Programming *symbiotic with an established Platform *designed for Concurrency And he says he couldn't find one. That's not a subjective statement -- there wasn't a language with all those features before Clojure. And I'll bet there's a lot of people that want those four things. His language does that very well. That doesn't mean it should be used for everything, but he never implied it that anyway -- quite to the contrary, he explicitly points out the problem domain that Clojure addresses. I think you misunderstand the designers of these new languages. Most of them aren't trying to make something "trendy" (that should be obvious by how many esoteric hobby languages there are). They are trying to solve problems. And if some people other than the author of the language can get some use along the way, well then that's just great. Clojure isn't the product of "immature minds" either. It's the product of one mind, and one that's spent many years thinking about good language design and many years working with software in industry.