After reading http://clojure.org/rationale and other performance comparisons between Clojure and many languages, I started to think that apart from ease of use, I shouldn't be coding in Python anymore, but in Clojure instead. Actually, I began to fill irresponsisble for not learning clojure seeing it's benefits.

Does it make sense? Can't I make really efficient use of all cores using a more imperative language like Python, than a lisp dialect or other functional language? It seems that all the benefits of it come from using immutable data, can't I do just that in Python and have all the benefits?

I once started to learn some Common Lisp, read and done almost all exercices from a book I borrowod from my university library (I found it to be pretty good, despite it's low popularity on Amazon). But, after a while, I got myself struggling to much to do some simple things. I think there's somethings that are more imperative in their nature, that makes it difficult to model those thins in a functional way, I guess.

The thing is, is Python as powerful as Clojure for building applications that takes advantages of this new multi core future?

Note that I don't think that using semaphores, lock mechanisms or other similar concurrency mechanism are good alternatives to Clojure 'automatic' parallelization.