A Look at the Main JVM Languages Today
, February 14, 2012 The JVM hosts an increasingly wide array of languages. Here we compare the prominent ones, mourn those that have come and gone, and celebrate newborn languages clamoring for attention.
Clojure
Clojure is a reinvention of Lisp on the JVM. Although it has been around for only a few years, it has already garnered considerable popularity due to the elegant S-expression syntax, tight integration with Java (Clojure compiles to bytecode using conventions that make it easy to call Java routines), and the support of an enthusiastic community. Some pundits predict that Clojure will be the way that functional languages make their way into the programming mainstream. (Similar claims have been made for Scala.)

