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I don't think that there will be that many competition, the ML folks that really want to try something new will go to F#, the Lisp folks will go to Clojure. Still there aren't that many reasons to abandon Common Lisp for Clojure(specially with Oracle controlling the JVM), or ML for F#(for Haskell maybe, but Haskell has its problems too).

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The only existing reason is that the two of them run on modern, enterprise accepted platforms. If you're hacking your personal projects in Lisp, you have no reason to switch. If you want to sling some Lisp/ML at work, well Clojure of F# are likely to be your only options.

In that setting, I think F# has an advantage currently, since it's an officially supported/blessed language on Visual Studio and .NET.

You could say Clojure is a Java library. It's a single JAR file.

To ship it, yes, but there's the compiler, too. With F#, if your organization uses the latest Visual Studio, you're good; but if your shop uses a typical Java IDE setup, anyone who wants to build your project has to do extra work beyond the standard environment (e.g. installing Clojure's Eclipse or NetBeans plugins, with extra fun if you depend on Clojure libs that use Leiningen).

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