Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp (2006)

Steve Yegge (author of submission) regarding Clojure (2012):

> For a few years I had been really excited to start learning Clojure, and my initial experiences with it were quite positive. However, I eventually learned that the Clojure community is extremely conservative. That is is pretty unusual for a Lisp dialect. Lisp is widely regarded as one of the most liberal language families in existence. And Clojure has the superficial appearance of being a laissez-faire kind of language. It is quite expressive, including a -- ahem -- liberal dose of new syntax. And it eschews static type annotations and strong type modeling in favor of a small set of highly regular, composable data types and operations -- not unlike, say, Scheme or Python. But the resemblance to a liberal language ends there. Clojure's community came pre-populated with highly conservative programmers from the pure-functional world: basically Haskell/ML types (lots of puns today!) who happen to recognize the benefits of Lisp's tree syntax. So under its expressive covers, everything about Clojure is strongly conservative, with a core overriding bias towards protecting programmers from mistakes.

From old (2013) HN comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6865464

Yegge, seemingly not knowing too much about the actual Lisp with some strange opinions about it (like that when there is a language spec, everything needs to be in there. He also thinks that macros have no tools?). He wanted a different language. Another Lisp influenced language, but different -> see his first point of too many variants.

There are lots of Lisp influenced languages. Pick on. Clojure is one. Maybe create a new one.

I like Clojure, but I don't understand how Clojure answers the article. The primary complaint in the article was "there are too many versions of Lisp". Whether or not that's a valid argument (it reminds me of the similar "there are too many Linux distros"), surely Clojure adds to the number of options.