&gt; Clojure hit the scene as a modern lisp that embraced the JVM.<p>&gt; By now, Clojure is the de facto standard lisp for new applications.<p>What&#x27;s with the whole, &quot;modern,&quot; meme when people talk about Clojure? SBCL only forked off from CMU CL in 1999. Clozure CL is still well supported and actively developed. It&#x27;s not like CL was written in the 1960s and had never changed ever since. The final standard was published in 1994. The alpha and beta of the JDK weren&#x27;t released until a year later. Given that Clojure leverages so much of the JVM what exactly makes it the modern, de-facto standard for new applications? Don&#x27;t we already have an ANSI standard for such a Lisp?<p>Is it modern because it can invent without restriction of a specification? That&#x27;s a good thing and plenty of other Lisps are doing that... but what makes it, &quot;modern,&quot; and why is it the standard? Is its relative immaturity a feature when you&#x27;re taking on the world in a startup?<p>Either way it&#x27;s not much of a secret anymore but I still don&#x27;t see many startups advertising that they use Lisp -- even Clojure is rather rare. I hope more people give Lisp a try and kick butt.