I've always assumed Clojure was the right choice for a Lisp to do web applications. Perhaps I should revaluate my assumptions.
(This isn't meant as a personal jab, but too many people focus on silly things like microbenchmarks when choosing tools, and not on other more important things like support avenues, tooling, libraries, etc.)
The real story here is that people are working on a number of new libraries/modules/tools for doing web development in CL — the benchmarks (as you correctly point out) are a minor detail.
It's just not clear from the context we have. But, caution! Microbenchmarks should only be Microtrusted.
My grand takeaway from Aphyr's Jepsen series (http://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen) is that the more sophisticated software becomes in the never-ending quest for features and performance, the more likely the fundamentals underlying it have been overlooked, glossed over, or ignored completely.
As aroman said, "The real story here is that people are working on a number of new libraries/modules/tools for doing web development in CL".
But apgwoz's general point about how we evaluate software is spot on. In general, I think benchmarks and the like have a sort of "woo"ing effect on people (in the James Randi sense), and we should probably take a few moments to reflect on that before making any major architectural decisions. :)
Leo Meyerovich did a study on the social factors that affect language adoption[0]. Vivek Haldar has a highlights the salient points[1]. More info at his site: [2]
[0]: http://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/socioplt/papers/oopsla201...
[1]: http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/56972066006/empirical-analy...
Indeed. It's sad that as engineers (who theoretically espouse logic, reason, and evidence) we still end up making so many decisions based on herd behavior.
For my anecdotal experience, apart from JS libs (where style over substance is frequently the norm) I find a well-designed website is usually a sign the project cares about its users, and is more likely to provide good documentation & a space to ask questions.
The primary benefit and cost, depending on your point of view, of clojure is that it runs on the JVM. I don't see how that would be a strong argument for or against using this tooling for any problem domain unless you were already committed to or against the JVM for other reasons.
If you ask me the strengths of Clojure that it is built upon abstraction/interfaces (ie. conj instead of cons) and how it manages hygiene while retaining quasiquotes templates leveraging clj's namespaces. But then again you should probably ask a clojurian instead.
As a data point, I moved from Common Lisp to Clojure and never regretted it. But the reason I switched was not because I read something online, but because of Clojure's concurrency support, which means I can create concurrent software that is robust.