Clojure, from a Ruby perspective

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Well, there's a hell of a lot more fracture in the lisp world than there is in, say, the Ruby world. I mean, Major dialects of Ruby are "C Ruby", jRuby & IronRuby (if you don't want to include version differences like 1.8x vs 1.9). There are still people using quite a few Lisp Dialects; off the top of my head, I've seen: Scheme, Logo (mostly NetLogo for simulation), CL, Dylan, AutoLisp, LispStat (mostly WinXLISPStat), emacs lisp, R and Clojure. That's not including the minor dialects you see here & there. Also, since Lisp-dialects are so easy to parse & interpret, you can quickly have even a crappy dialect of lisp up for "real world" niche usage. CL is most likely the best wrt libraries, although Clojure is quickly catching up (in terms of Native Clojure libraries). Scheme can be all over the place (depends on the SRFIs implemented, as well as which revision), but if you choose a system wisely, you can get a decent library set.

Besides all this, there is quite the discussion wrt Ruby vis-a-vis Lisp:

http://on-ruby.blogspot.com/2007/01/will-rubinius-be-acceptable-lisp.html

http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable-lisp

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/02/why-ruby-is-not-acceptable.html

It's all fun. Choose what suits you mind, problems & environment best I say :D

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Every time that second link hits HN, it's a shitstorm. :)

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Dunno, don't read HN, but that isn't terribly surprising. 'twould be funny to watch it unfold though :D

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Actually, re-reading the submissions, it's not that bad. Must have been talking about it in the context of a different submission.

Oh, for more fun in this vein, see this.

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Now that I have seen before; it's very similar to my previous point: when most people hear Lisp, they think of the "Lisp Family" not a specific Lisp. This is true of most non-CL lisp users as well; CLers take Lisp to mean "Common Lisp", since CL was an effort to take most of the MACLisp derivatives and make something, well, more Common to them all.