Speaking as someone who has lately been studying Common Lisp, I'm not quite sure how I feel about Clojure; I like that it's hosted on the JVM, but I don't like the apparent lack of a debugger, which to my mind is a sine qua non of Lisp development. I haven't seen much in the way of progress on that front, either, but it's been a few months since I last looked into it; is there any sign that that handicap is likely to be repaired?
I'm the author of Cursive, a Clojure IDE based on IntelliJ. Cursive currently has a fairly minimal and occasionally frustrating debugger that I'm planning to improve soon. That said, I use it all the time and it works pretty well. It's really nice to be able to debug a REPL session. Currently breakpoints and stepping work well, and expression evaluation somewhat works but is pretty quirky. Types and names are all currently displayed as Java, unfortunately. I'm planning to have a debug REPL per stack frame when I get around to upgrading this part. I'm hoping to get to this sometime within the next month.
Well, I'm glad to see that you at least appear to be headed in more or less the right direction. I'm not about to invest $100 in Clojure at this early stage of the language's development, but I'll be interested to see how the tooling continues to progress.
