>> “I think the most innovative part of Clojure is the fact that it's actually used”
Popularity is not “innovative”.
Popularity is not “innovative”.
However, if "Clojure" in that sentence is interpreted in a wider, more general and necessarily less concrete sense -- to represent the language, ecosystem, branding, etc -- good marketing/advertising, community management, and general operations-level can be rife with places to innovate.
An excellent language that never gets adopted has effectively zero value IMHO until it's corpse is ransacked by a language that does get adopted. People rediscover things that older languages have done all the while almost every week it seems -- creating a language and the requisite community to actually drive adoption can be considered innovative if the rest of the rest of the landscape is sufficiently similar. Clearly the Clojure project is doing something differently from the Common Lisp/Scheme/Racket crowd.
It is like Windows. When it appeared it was significantly inferior to Unix options, but it made a hundred or a thousand times more people to experience computers.
If a 1 to 10 percent of people is naturally innovative and creative, then the platform with most users ends innovating way more.
Lisp use at first was restricted only to Academics, it was so inefficient that you even required a very special(and expensive) purpose computer to run it. Those academics were not paying the machine with their paycheck so they didn't care.
More affordable solutions like c became popular and forced Lisp to improve(creating compilation pathways and so on), when it was obvious everyone was using the c toolchain(c++, objc, java).
Lisp was spreading in the 60s to everyone who had a mainframe or mini computer. In the 70s first applications were built and companies like BBN, Xerox, IBM started to use Lisp. In the 80s Common Lisp was standardized upon a DARPA initiative to have a single Lisp language for the applications they were prototyping or deploying in the military. The military got huge applications for battle management, battle simulation&training (like SIMNET), planning, design & construction developed by contractors.
> it was so inefficient that you even required a very special(and expensive) purpose computer to run it
Lisp developers required a personal workstation and thus they co-invented them in the 70s. Machines with 1 Megabyte or more RAM for a single user. Machines where one could develop and work with programs like Macsyma, an early computer algebra system widely used in maths and physics.
> creating compilation pathways and so on
efficient execution of Lisp on non-special-purpose hardware was available in the 70s for example with Maclisp and in the 80s with Common Lisp.
Characterized by the creation of new ideas or things
>> "It is like Windows ... but it made a hundred or a thousand times more people to experience computers."
Right, but that's completely irrelevant and not innovation.
Honestly, I think the word "innovation" needs to be tabooed from the discussion to get meaningful questions and answers.
> Popularity is not “innovative”.
But the way to reach popularity is innovative, at least for a lisp.