> ”Clojure has many interesting modern ideas, but I feel being so tied to Java and the JVM has hurt a bit in the long run.”

Would you expand on this? From my perspective, it actually opens up Clojure to a lot of opportunities where introducing, say, Common Lisp or Racket, would be a much harder lift. Clojure’s just a library, and immediately has available the entire Java ecosystem. Granted, it’s based only on my experience, but I’ve much more frequently seen first-class (provided by a vendor or otherwise officially sanctioned) Java libraries for services and other tooling than Common Lisp or Racket. Being able to take something like that off the shelf for integration is a big plus in my experience.

But, additionally, CL makes binding to C libraries really easy via CFFI and things like cl-autowrap ( https://github.com/rpav/cl-autowrap ) so, when there isn't a native lisp library, it's often easy enough to just use a C library in your program (or, I suppose, anything that can compile to something compatible with C like `extern C` in C++ and the equivalent constructs in Rust)