I used to program in Common Lisp. While it was great, I always had the feeling of being "somewhere else". All the cool things were happening elsewhere. I had to implement many things on my own instead of using other people's solutions, because they were solving their problems elsewhere.

I get the opposite feeling with Clojure. We used it to write a scalable distributed system. A number of ideas emerged. And then I see those ideas properly designed and implemented in systems like Storm, and now — Avout. It's a wonderful feeling when things just happen in front of you and you get great code that you can use, in your favorite language.

Best of all, there is real innovation. People don't just clone Ruby on Rails, many new designs are a large step up.