I agree, I much prefer native compiled languages. I really like clojure and used it for about a year. I stopped because In doing a lot of embedded development so I need to use C and Ive been using C++/qt for desktop gui apps. Since then, though, Ive been kinda put off going back to clojure because its not native compiled even though I like the language itself.
Not really. I've toyed with both Common Lisp and Scheme and while I love Scheme for its simplicity and minimalism (at the core, anyway), in my mind they're both really quite different from what Clojure provides. Common Lisp seemed much too clunky and patched together to me, compared to how Clojure is designed to cleanly sit on top of its sequence abstraction, Clojure's notion of time and concurrency and even just how Clojure eliminates the need for some of the parentheses that are required in CL.
I'm sure its a matter of taste (and I actually do quite like Scheme, I guess just not enough to try and make it work for me right now...).
Having said that and ignoring Clojure, I also appreciate languages with a little more syntax sometimes, so I guess that's also held me back a bit. I should give Scheme or Common Lisp another try and see if I can't use it for my current work, but its hard to set the time aside, I guess.
