I actually have played around with it! I think Clojure feels a lot more polished, but it's also a lot more rigid, which I could definitely see someone disliking. LFE almost feels a little more like Common Lisp, although that's more to do with Erlang and the BEAM than any specific syntax choice. Plus, of course, you get to work with all that OTP goodness. If had to choose between LFE and Clojure as the only language I ever programmed in again, it would be a really hard tossup. Clojure might have a relatively larger community, but I don't want to give up the BEAM!

The reason LFE didn't do it for me was that Elixir is relatively painless syntax-wise, and has really nice high-level libraries like Phoenix and Ecto that simplify a lot of work. If I don't need the BEAM, than I'd rather have a more strictly functional language like Clojure, or something more low-level like Common Lisp. LFE doesn't occupy a niche in my personal ecosystem. That being said, I'd definitely give it another try sometime, and I'd recommend it to anyone else who wants to feel the power of the BEAM.

Clojure is the most practically expressive language I've ever had the pleasure of working with. For some reason the example that immediately comes to mind is how you can use a collection as an accesser for itself, so ({:a 2 :b 3} :a) returns 2. Just a neat bit of syntactic sugar, but now if 'blacklist' is a set, you can just do (remove blacklist guests) to remove everything in blacklist from guests. There's a hundred little things like that which combine to make it a really fun and concise language to work with.

I can't possibly sing the praises of Cider loudly enough. Emacs is a hard sell, I get that, but Cider is such a nice way of working with Clojure.