Posted this on the article's comments: I have been following Clojure with some interest lately. I'm still a Common Lisp guy though because Clojure is still in

Posted this on the article's comments: I have been following Clojure with some interest lately. I'm still a Common Lisp guy though because Clojure is still in flux and evolving rapidly from what I see. I also see the fact that all Clojure programs are Java programs as a plus and a minus: a plus because you get access to all the Java libraries and JITs and whatnot out there, but a minus because there can't be any independent Clojure port. In the real world to make an interesting port of Clojure you will also have to port all of Java so applications work. It's like if no one wrote Unix/Linux applications but only Windows and counted on Wine always being there. With regard to state -- and Paul Barry already touched on this -- I recently started implementing a small app which needs some persistent state. I thought to try doing it in Clojure but found out that while Common Lisp has tools like Rucksack and Elephant and CLSQL, if I wanted it in Clojure I would need first to create all my data structures as Java objects (albeit with (. blahblah) wrappers if I wanted) then run them through some clumsy Java ORM, or deal with raw JDBC or Java Berkeley DB. If I missed something that's already out there and available I would love to be pointed to it, but it seems to me Clojure could benefit from a native persistence mechanism or library that takes advantage of its concurrency strengths, or at least a native API for something like Berkeley DB that can deal well with it.