Clojure borrows from C++, C#, Common Lisp, Erlang, Haskell, Mathematica, ML, Prolog, Scheme, Java, Racket, Ruby - according to Wikipedia.
I would guess that 10% of its operator names come from Lisp. Okay, that's a wild guess. Let's look at the special forms:
def-, if+, do-, let+, quote+, var-, fn-, loop-, recur-, throw-, try-, monitor-enter-, monitor-exit, ...
Around three from thirteen special forms have roughly the same name/meaning in Lisp.
Let's look at printing: pr-, prn-, print-, println-, newline-. None Lisp names, either they don't exist in Lisp under that name or they do something else. PR and PRN don't exist in Lisp. PRINT prints a newline before printing the object. PRINTLN does not exist in Lisp. NEWLINE is called TERPRI. Thus even for a simple thing as basic IO the API is different.
Re:Dinosaur and Lisp
by qwertyuiop924 on Friday August 26, 2016 @03:52PM
(#12368853)
Small differences in IO are usually simple to deal with, and quite common between other lisps, such as Scheme, and picolisp.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7671549
For the rest of the family, there's a lot of mutual intelligibility. And, a metaphor is a metaphor, no metaphor holds if you dig deep enough.
> A Lisp developer looking at Clojure code will understand very very little.
This is an assumption, not a fact. Java interop code and (recur) are a bit confusing in the first sight, but not undecipherable.
The prog lang that's most like English is C++: too many things are overtly overloaded, see phrasal verbs.