Atoms

Clojure takes another step away from Lisp. Clojure now as "atoms" which are not to be confused with Lisp atoms. Not necessarily a bad thing. I'm just saying.

Since they are a kind of "shared reference" maybe they could have been called "arefs". Oops. No. That is a ubiquitous Common Lisp function for arrays. I guess there are only so many terms to be applied. So to speak.

Lisp is a great vehicle for language experiments. Clojure is a vehicle for that on the JVM, specifically in the area of transactional memory and coordination via shared references. I'm not a big, big fan of this scheme so far, but I'm interested to see where it goes.