I'd recommend this show to anyone who would like to know what the deal is with Clojure. I found it very interesting that to me Rich's explanation about Clojure's deal was much more eye opening than the Clojure book we've been reading in class. I think that that is the case because we take a practical course. Our book is called Programming in Clojure (if I recall correclty), not The deal with Clojure. Not Clojure's deal. And now I see the explanation behind Clojure as something far more interesting than actually programming in clojure.
From this show I understood that Clojure's deal is.. concurrency(?) I am still not very sure but the point I'd make is that it's deal goes beyond Lisp even though it is a Lisp. The upside of this thought is that I think it deals with problems that the maker(s) of clojure saw in a lot of places through the programming language 'zoo' as they call it.
Even though it ended up being a good introduction to Lisp, I now understand that its designed around the concurrency problem even though it is meant to be a general purpose language.
I think I can more clearly see why we're studying the things we are studying in our programming languages class, but I'd still like to learn some theory behind them (if there is any) that would account for all of them and their differences, not instead of but in parallel with the practical things we've been doing.