Rich Hickey created Clojure and first released it publicly in 2007.
Clojure is a modern Lisp dialect designed primarily for the Java Virtual Machine. It emphasizes functional programming, immutable data structures, and concurrency, while allowing programs to use Java libraries directly.
Clojure's name combines “closure” with the initials of languages influential to its design, including C, Lisp, and Java. It is written with Lisp's characteristic parenthesized syntax, which can make it look unfamiliar to programmers coming from Java or C-like languages.
Clojure is not the same language as ClojureScript, although ClojureScript adapts many of its ideas for compilation to JavaScript. Clojure's persistent data structures and software transactional memory were designed to make shared-state concurrency easier to manage.