While this is a decent article in its core argument, it's a bit misleading in some of the details.
Methods are not true closures, and can't be passed directly to higher-order functions.
You can trivially wrap a Java method in a fn, and Clojure has syntactic sugar (the #() notation for anonymous function literals) to help with this.
Slow numeric performance.
This is true in the 1.2 release, but the next version of Clojure addresses this problem in (IMO) a very elegant way. Search on the mailing list for discussion of the num branch for more information. If numeric performance concerns your problem domains, please use the branches that resolve this.
Slow startup time.
Yes, the JVM starts slowly. I restart Clojure REPLs about once a week. I don't exactly notice this problem. Clojure isn't like Python or Ruby or Perl, where you start new interpreters all the time.
Methods are not true closures, and can't be passed directly to higher-order functions.
You can trivially wrap a Java method in a fn, and Clojure has syntactic sugar (the #() notation for anonymous function literals) to help with this.
Slow numeric performance.
This is true in the 1.2 release, but the next version of Clojure addresses this problem in (IMO) a very elegant way. Search on the mailing list for discussion of the num branch for more information. If numeric performance concerns your problem domains, please use the branches that resolve this.
Slow startup time.
Yes, the JVM starts slowly. I restart Clojure REPLs about once a week. I don't exactly notice this problem. Clojure isn't like Python or Ruby or Perl, where you start new interpreters all the time.