As a genuine interest, please could you clear up what is meant by "Lisp All The Way Down."? I've implemented my own Lisp interpreter in Scheme before, and I looked at the interpreter from McCarthy's original paper, but in both of these, the interpreter still required some language (albeit one with list-processing procedures) to begin with. My experience would be that there's nothing special with Lisp in this regard, just that its _really_ easy to parse, but I still hear this claim often enough - am I missing something here?

And to answer your post, I'd say that Clojure does give you what you need - it gives you the axioms, it gives you defmacro - the rest is history. All those other library functions you can think of in a more abstract sense ("George's problem"), and in the end these should be machine code no matter which HLL they were originally written in.

The Lisp way has always been very dynamic - you can change things, even when they're orbiting Mars, but Clojure is functional, you generally don't change things. So in that sense, Clojure is not a true Lisp, but only because it chooses a different set of trade-offs, and if you don't like that then its fine, but it doesn't make Clojure evil, just different.