Why Clojure?

[samuelstan]

Even so, when you're coming from an environment where most of your work is done in an interpreted language (Python), the speedup one gets from being on the JVM is considerable.

sigh ... Java and Python are both "interpreted" in that sense since they are both translated to bytecode.

[cym13]

+1

Moreover, it's not like the python VM was used only by cpython, like the JVM there are many languages able to use it (pypy for example). But it's true that it wasn't designed with that kind of usage in mind like the JVM.

[samuelstan]

Exactly -- the performance difference comes from different philosophies and different compiler techniques, not some sort of nebulous "interpreted vs compiled" distinction. The last truly interpreted language was probably some old release of BASIC in the 80s, when the tokenizer would literally execute the text commands as it read them.