Frameworks are big in Java-land because you need an enormous amount of scaffolding to make any non-trivial application work. That's less true in other languages. Libraries and interoperability with other languages are more important, and where LISP has traditionally suffered. Clojure has a lot of potential, but there are a lot of languages poised in the wings right now, all jockeying to be the next big thing. F# for example is functional (it's descended from OCaml) and has full access to the .NET libraries, which are as comprehensive as Java's, and has the backing of a major vendor. Now if Sun were to pick up Clojure and make it the official functional language on the Java platform, that would be something.