"They don't look very comparable to me. Unless I'm mistaken, the clojure one communicates with telnet clients who maintain a socket connect, but only relies on the basic libraries which ship with clojure. The scala one is a webapp that is sitting on top of a lot of specialized machinery provided by lift. They are both short chat applications in the new cool languages on the JVM, but other than that they don't seem very comparable to me." - Robin Barooah