[simongray]

They're not trying to be the same thing.

- Clojure has a unique take on state management backed up by unique value semantics. This has created an emergent data-oriented paradigm.

- It heavily favours functional programming and all of the built-in data structures are persistent.

- It is designed to be used and reused across different host environments (CLJC), not just the JVM.

- It bases its collections on a common, flexible abstraction (seq) and has introduced very useful data literals for maps, sets, vectors, regexes, etc.

- It eliminated a bunch of anachronisms like superfluous parens everywhere and car/cdr, while introducing useful syntax for destructuring.

- It's a Lisp-1 like Scheme.