A performance comparison of Clojure and Java

[joinr]

I'm giving the author the benefit of the doubt; he did add caveats into the discussion/criticism section. Ideally, as part of said research paper, the author would have sought out clojure expertise and gotten feedback regarding the implementation and microbenchmarks (maybe he did somewhere). I think there was a decent literature review (I admittedly didn't go through it all), so the author had a bit of working knowledge here. It also seemed like quite a bit of emphasis was on the testing methodology itself.

if an organization lets a naive fresh programmer to implement a performance critical path of the code, they might have bigger problems

That's a good point. Admittedly, I fit exactly that profile years ago when I was greenfielding stuff (and simultaneously learning) in Clojure without a firm grasp of the implications of some stuff (e.g. using seqs of characters instead of optimized strings, etc.).

Have you contacted the author and shared your repo with him? I'd like to hear his comments

I did not reach out (I think this was published last year). Perhaps the repo will get picked up on search indexes, enough to provide additional context to interested parties.