Clojure: the Lisp that wants to spread

ARANK

From its humble beginnings, Clojure was always meant to be a “hosted” language. It is important to note that while the Clojure of today is definitely a tightly integrated JVM (Java Virtual Machine) language, there were always multiple implementations of Clojure.The language was consciously designed with its host abstracted away, apart from the host-specific functions in the java namespace and in glimpses of Java interop code. The same held for theCLR implementation of Clojure for the .NET Common Language Runtime, released concurrently, with its very similar-looking interop code.Interestingly, Rich Hickey made an implementation of Clojure in Common Lisp too, but abandoned it prior to the public announcement of Clojure.Later, ClojureScript managed to do the same, but with a js namespace rather than a java one. The interop code also looks similar, though the js namespace is much more commonly referenced than any of the java ones, as everything in JavaScript derives from one big namespa…