I view the JVM choice as a pragmatic choice to encourage wider adoption rather than a technical choice. Possibly it eased implementation too having a high-quali

I view the JVM choice as a pragmatic choice to encourage wider adoption rather than a technical choice. Possibly it eased implementation too having a high-quality GC, but overall the drawbacks are quite severe, because they outright preclude Clojure from being used in situations outside the "long-running server process" use case. It is even possible that he viewed the JVM as a stopgap to be abstracted out when and if the language got popular. It seems they are moving in this direction with ClojureScript. Clearly he made this decision thoughtfully and consciously because he was an expert in C++ before he ever wrote a line of Clojure interpreter, and could have made it native if he wanted. But the argument "Clojure is successful, therefore all his decisions must have been optimal" (caracaturing you a little bit) is obviously false. Replace "Clojure" with "Linux" or even "Windows" and you see the fallacy.