> I can come back to a Clojure program I wrote ten years ago and it runs great

Is that thanks to JVM or due to the way how Clojure works? Because I can share the same anecdotes for my Clojurescript projects. I can grab any old nbb script and things just work off the bat - sometimes I have to update some npm dependency, but most of the time, things simply aren't horribly broken. Meanwhile, I just spent half a day jumping around for weird Python dependency and venv magic dance, just for the sake of running five interdependent scripts.

It's not clear whether the author built the Clojure program into a jar or not. If so, it would be thanks to the JVM.

In any case, the dominant way people build Clojure has changed. Ten years ago it probably used lein. Nowadays a new project will probably use deps.edn.

i think this is because of Clojure's mentality on backwards compatibility and not the JVM specifically. please someone correct me if im wrong tho!