Lisp is a programming language known for its expressiveness and power. But it was often thought of as not being well suited for general use. That has all changed with Clojure, a Lisp dialect that runs on the Java™ platform.

Created by Rich Hickey, Clojure targets both the Java Virtual Machine and the Common Language Runtime (CLR). It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language — it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

If you want to know more about Clojure and the general problems it aims to address, you may want to watch this video wherein Rich Hickey (the creator of Clojure) explains the particulars of this very interesting language.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-Rich-Hickey-and-Brian-Beckman-Inside-Clojure/