[rads]

Clojure is important because it's a Lisp that runs on the JVM and uses existing Java libraries. It has taken big steps to improve Lisp's accessibility.

Do you like Lisp? If you like Lisp, Clojure is its most pragmatic dialect. I personally enjoy the simple, consistent syntax and functional programming style that Ruby lacks.

Note that while Clojure was designed with concurrency in mind, it's also good at other things — like Ruby, it's a general purpose language. However, you're going to be more productive writing a web app with Ruby right now because there are no libraries for Clojure that are as robust as Rails. That may change as Clojure's ecosystem grows.

[dkersten]

Its more a case of do you understand lisp, because it seems to me that few people who really understand it actually dislike it, while most people who don't understand it seem to dislike it (parentheses and prefix notation being the two things people seem to hate most). Its difficult to explain the benefits of Lisp to someone who doesn't already understand Lisp...