Common Lisp is 29 years old(if we count from the publication of CLTL1) or 19 years old(if we count from the publication of the ANSI standard), clojure is 5-6 years old. Scheme is even older. I love clojure, but it has some mighty big shoes to fill, CL was build for longevity from the beginning. Also, both scheme and CL run on the JVM. CL also survived the death of many operating systems, architectures and platforms in those 29 years, clojure is yet to survive one.
To me, Common Lisp appears to suffer from bad timing. It was designed on the cusp of paradigm shifts from timesharing to networking; from text interfaces to graphic interfaces; and from computers being rare to being ubiquitous. Hitting it's peak in popular consciousness in the midst of the Black Friday and S&L recession didn't help either.
My view is premised upon the idea that a major deficit of Common Lisp is a poor access to contemporary independent user interfaces. The solutions that exist are not competitive with the leverage Clojure enjoys from JVM (and .NET).
You are somewhat correct, but one of the reasons I love common lisp is exactly because it sort of overcame this "bad timing", which is very unforgiving to lesser languages. The fact that today I can write lisp apps in a language whose primary platform(the lisp machine) died 20 years ago, and still enjoy a relatively active ecosystem is quite impressive.
Do you think clojure has the potential to be useful in 20 years if the JVM dies today hypothetically? I don't know, I think yes, because it has a bunch of good ideas, but it isn't at all clear. Take JS as an opposite example, if the web is to disappear, JS will disappear as well, no matter how many other platforms it is ported to, it just isn't good enough to stand on its own.
I could be talking out of my ass here, but my point was that CL has a good track record for survival, so it has the potential for a 100 year language, while clojure is yet to prove itself for such a task. These things are extremely hard to predict, tech history has a habit of throwing such wild-cards as personal computing and the web. We'll see.
The primary platform of CL did not die. CL was ALWAYS developed on multiple platforms. From day -1 there were implementations on non Lisp Machine platforms. People actually ran companies to do so: Lucid (Unix), Franz (Unix, PC), Coral (Mac), Goldworks (PC), Procyon (PC, Mac), Harlequin (Unix), ... The Carnegie Mellon University developed CMUCL for Unix. Japanese developers KCL (Unix, ...), CLISP from Germany, ...
You are correct, I think, on the bad timing. Also factor in that Common Lisp used to be expensive to use and deploy. In the early 1980s, I 'went cheap' and bought a Xerox 1108 (for $25K, which was a lot of money in those days). Deployment costs? Buy a 1108 for each customer. Yuck! I used my 1108 for prototyping and demos (and made money selling an AI product written for it), but no deployed systems.
Today with free SBCL and Clozure (among many others), deployment is free - what I would have given in the 1980s for something like SBCL!
My bet is that when Clojure gets to be 29 years old it will, also, suffer from several problems. I don't believe it is possible to design a future proof programming language. Who knows what will come next and how it will affect programming tasks?
