Why Clojure is worth it to me
I was glad to see Rich Hickey ask the Clojure community to financially support his dedicated time and energy during 2010. Much better this than unraveling with very little warning and causing a thousand forks to bloom.
The asking price was very reasonable when you compare it to any large, respectable software development book. I have many of those (well, maybe not all 10 volumes of SOA in a nutshell)... but even my favorite books cover very narrow topics in great depth. That's it, just some dead trees waiting to be used as references for types of problems I don't run into often.
Clojure covers many topics in depth with consistent pragmatism. No time to bootstrap libraries? Use the plethora of .jar files out there. No time/focus to sustain a world-class virtual machine? Use Sun's! Not interested in churning out another keyword-heavy language grammar? Use Lisp... but thanks for cleaning it up first 
The rest of the time can go writing a compiler sufficiently smart to avoid head holding by implementing fine-grained local clearing... add some high level concepts for concurrency via software transactional memory? Sure!
Another tangible reason I'm happy to pay real money is the Clojure community. It has been helpful in many ways. Every major editor has some level of support... the IRC channel is great. People are even building infrastructure (looking at you Leiningen and Clojars!)
Ultimately I'm just being selfish. Swearing at the REPL until enlightenment conks you on the head is a rush... it's a minor victory with a thousand similar battles on the horizon. I like supporting good projects and I'm looking forward to spending lots more time with Clojure.
