Representing vectors, matrices or general arrays as anything other than a single contiguous chunk of inline values is a complete non-starter for numerical work

Representing vectors, matrices or general arrays as anything other than a single contiguous chunk of inline values is a complete non-starter for numerical work since you can't call BLAS, LAPACK, FFTW or any other high quality numerical library on e.g. Clojure's vectors. Without those libraries, you lose many orders of magnitude performance on crucial operations like matrix multiplication.