Bonus: Plenty of other great interviews linked to from the first paragraph of the article. I am reading an interview of Simin Peyton Jones. http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/261007/-z_programmin...

The complete list is at http://www.computerworld.com.au/tag/a-z%20of%20programming%2...

very informative and enjoyable! There goes the day. I'll be reading these all day!

Did anyone else notice that he's started mentioning the CLR a lot more in this article? I know that there has been some recent work on getting Clojure running on the CLR and Clojure-in-Clojure; but I thought it was interesting that it's starting to return to Rich's conversations as well.

Yeah, which makes some sense. I think Clojure's strength is that it makes inroads with Java developers (as opposed to Common Lisp guys jumping over). If he can get the same excitement out of some .NET'ers it could double his user base.

"Right now we're in the early adopter phase, with startups and ISVs using Clojure as a secret weapon and power tool."

Are any YC start-ups using Clojure?

Well it wouldn't be a "secret weapon" then, would it?

I'm not a YC startup, but I consider using Clojure for several projects. Am still checking it out.

Nice! I've been waiting for the Clojure A-Z serious interview for while.

So:

Clojure was born as a hybrid of FP and CL for the JVM, as that seemed perfect to the authors personal experience...

Sorry, but I'll not abandon my own way for such a personal preference style (if I only could remember where I already saw this pattern... hm [...]).

I'm perfectly OK with my chosen Lisp system (no, I won't tell you, no war fan I am).

"The author prefers it" is suddenly a problem with a language? Have a look at Clojure; it's a very nice language on its own merits. (I particularly like the combination of software transactional memory with by-default immutable data structures.)