Do you have an ideological or practical opposition? Java is cross-platform enough for it not to be an issue. Are you memory-constrained?

Mostly due to the security risk. Especially on Windows. Even being a software developer (read: not your average computer user) and taking extra precautions (like click-to-run for java use in browsers) I've still gotten hit by malware that takes advantage of security holes in the Java runtime.

I second the exact sentiment on OSX.

And running a VM with linux (or windows, java is as much a pain on either platform) is a lot of effort for running an editor.

As long as it needs java installed, I'm out...

Then disable the java plugin for all your browsers. I think you can even disable java web start.

You could use a virtual machine running Linux for more security.

How would you like them to run clojure, a JVM based language?

There is an official, up-to-date ("within a week or so of milestones on Clojure main") .NET port at https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr

Maybe once Light Table is somewhat stable, someone can hack it to use ClojureCLR for the benefit of the security-conscious Windows users :)

I really should get involved in open source projects.

I think the issue will be compiling it for the CLR and then distributing it. The current script gets and runs a JAR, but I 'd imagine it would be relatively trivial to modify the script to run the CLR instead - but you'd have to build from the source included in the JAR (if it's all there...)

Haven't had much experience with it myself, it has been a while since I've played with Clojure.

Or simply use [IKVM](http://www.ikvm.net/).