Why not Common Lisp or Scheme?
The community is what does it. I tried for years to get commercial work in Common Lisp. It never happened.
Here's an excerpt:
Why did I write yet another programming language? Basically because I wanted:
A Lisp for Functional Programming symbiotic with an established Platform designed for Concurrency and couldn’t find one.
Nevertheless, even an ordinary CS student would notice, that there is literally nothing extraordinary in Clojure which was not being researched and implemented in other languages, like Erlang, Scheme (that subset of it which does not include set-car! and set-cdr!) SML and, obviously, Common Lisp. The systematizing effort and ability to deliver are exceptional.
So, I am sorry, but I am not buying these marketing slogans, because I know on which principles it has been made.
The particular combination/integration of features and the embedding in a Java environment is what made it liked by its target audience.
>"and Clojure is the first Lisp I'd consider using in production".
I can't really understand the logic in this. If anything, CL has more going for it for production usage, like ANSI standarization and many high-performance compilers.
Furthermore, not only JVM: other CL compilers let you target the LLVM. And of course you also have native compilers like SBCL which produce blazingly fast code.