Clojure feels like a 'compromise' Haskell, but I mean that in a good way. Haskell really wants to pretend that everything is a pure function. But I think this is a case where the conceptually simpler thing (i.e. no state) is just too hard to reason about.

Clojure backs off the 'referential transparency ONLY' philosophy, and merely discourages mutability. In my (limited) experience, this gives almost all of the advantages of Haskell, but an environment that's easier to program in.

So yeah, I'm excited about Clojure too. I just wish we could port it off the JVM...