"I hope the Clojure guys change things."

In many ways, Clojure seems like a deliberate response to each of the common complaints against Lisp.

    Lisp is old and moldy. It must be primitive by today's standards.

Hard to call Clojure "old" when it's only been around a couple years.

    The exciting languages to learn now are Python, Ruby, Groovy, etc.

Clojure has been very successful at building nerd "street cred." It has latched onto the fascination with functional programming for parallel applications, for one. It also makes use of concise syntax for data structure literals, like Python and Ruby, too. Dynamic, etc. etc.

    Lisp is only for artificial intelligence.

Don't think Clojure has this problem.

    Lisp is interpreted and slow.
    Lisp programs page heavily, so they're even slower.

Clojure gets the performance benefits of running on the highly tuned JVM, with tricks like type hints to get close to Java speeds for critical portions of code. Worst case, you can always drop into Java as your "assembly" language.

    The parentheses look weird and hard to manage.

Clojure mixes up () with [] {} to make code easier to mentally parse.

    Lisp uses prefix notation for things that every other popular language
    does with infix notation, which is just very weird. (And it leads to
    more parentheses.)

No change here.

    Lisp is too big.
    Lisp is too hard to learn.

Clojure is pretty small and doesn't take much time to get started.

    Lisp is all about lists and recursion; that's all you do with it.

Some might start to think "Clojure is all about functional programming." Don't know if that's good or bad.

    I don't know which implementation to use.

There's only one Clojure implementation.

    It isn't "batteries included" (that is, it's not easy to get set up with all the tools and libraries you need).

You get all the libraries written for Java.

    I don't like Emacs, and you can't use Lisp without Emacs.

I use Emacs, which is also great for Clojure, so I can't judge how easy it is to program in Clojure without Emacs.

    Lisp isn't useful for my career; few potential employers want it.

You might be able to sneak Clojure into a Java shop.