I was not 'bashing' scala. I discussed the tradeoff between removing old cruft from the language and breaking old crufty code. I was careful throughout that ent

I was not 'bashing' scala. I discussed the tradeoff between removing old cruft from the language and breaking old crufty code. I was careful throughout that entire comment to only discuss differences between the languages and communites and not make or imply any value judgement. I'm trying to provide useful information for people deciding between scala and clojure, not start a fight. With regards to binary compatibility, what I think you are missing is that clojure libraries are almost always distributed as source code. The clojure compiler is fast enough to just compile everything at runtime (during development at least) and clojure has not broken source / api compatibility since the first major version. Where AOT compilation is useful is: a) Improving application startup time b) Shipping libraries which generate java classes at compile-time (usually to c) Shipping proprietary libraries without source code I would definitely like to see the community figure out binary compatibility between libraries to improve cases b and c but it's really not a pressing concern. EDIT: On AOT compilation http://dev.clojure.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1572898 http://dev.clojure.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1572898