> I suspect the authors main problem with Clojure

That's not a very nice thing to do, suspecting people without any kind of evidence. Not to mention the fact that there is a `set!` form in Clojure, which makes it entirely possible to write very imperative code (and thread-local semantics don't matter in single-threaded programs).

Anyway, "problems with Clojure" can be very different for different people. I like Clojure design as a language - even its interop with OO host features are very neat - but then when I want to hack some simple script in a REPL I not only need to write this:

    $ rlwrap java -cp "clojure-1.5.1.jar" clojure.main

but then I need to wait for freaking 6 seconds for the prompt to appear. 6 seconds. I don't know what more I could write here, so I'll just paste this (Chicken Scheme):

    $ time csi -e '(exit)'
    csi -e '(exit)'  0,01s user 0,00s system 81% cpu 0,007 total

So that's my problem with Clojure, nothing to do with "functional way", right?