My understanding (as a Lisp beginner but with 15+ years commercial development experience) is that Common Lisp has more powerful macro systems, better tooling a

My understanding (as a Lisp beginner but with 15+ years commercial development experience) is that Common Lisp has more powerful macro systems, better tooling and better error handling. Some commercial Common Lisp implementations are also known for good, portable GUI frameworks. Clojure has better support for concurrency, very good JVM integration, and a better story around Javascript courtesy Clojurescript (vs. Common Lisp's parenscript). While some people seem quite strongly averse to Clojure (see e.g. http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42) my opinion - again, that of a Lisp beginner - is that they both have their uses. It's certainly possible to build web front-ends and API-based back-ends using Common Lisp. I know because I'm doing it now :)