You're learning clojure and don't know scheme?

I actually did this.

Frigging worthless university programming courses didn't bother teaching scheme.

Learning scheme's libraries on my own along with the lisp paradigm proved too daunting before (or maybe I just never found the right toy project to stick with, not really sure). Having java libraries there to back me up (I was doing stuff with hadoop too, so that made sense) gave me the little leg up I needed to get over the hump.

write factorial in scheme, then in clojure. And you might see an very interesting difference. Hint: the jvm does not have tail call optimization.

As if somebody would pick Scheme over Clojure for tail call optimization alone.

Clojure has a lot of handy stuff and the fact that's built on top of the JVM (with its limitations, indeed) is a major plus.