I understand some one like you is far more experienced and has been around for a long time. So obviously you know better than I ever will. And you are right. Even with very minimal Lisp exposure, after using Scheme and Common Lisp, Clojure's TCO thing feels unacceptable.

In fact after using Common Lisp, and I'm a novice, even some one like me feels Common Lisp to be a far superior language compared to other Lisps around.

The issue is, like I said, I started learning lisp starting with Scheme, and I started recently. First book was SICP, second was 'The Little Schemer', third was 'The Seasoned Schemer'. At that point your brain is hard programmed to think in terms of recursion, and whenever I see loops my mind moves to recursion automatically. You have to trust me when I say this, when I read PG's ANSI Common Lisp book , I skipped the sections on iterations and loops, because I thought I would never use them anyway.

I have to say those Schemer books do their job really well.

May be I just need more practice, so I will develop more stuff in Clojure, now that its not even possible to do that Clojure, eventually that TCO addiction should go away.

:)

You have read a good selection of Scheme books. It's very useful to explore that style of programming and be able to really understand. Take it only as a hint, that there is more out there and that different styles and approaches exist. One can program with functions, one can program with linguistic abstractions, ... McCarthy called his paper: 'Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine' - this hints that one programs with recursive functions - but it enables also to compute with symbolic expressions - not only as data, but also as code. The evaluator as a recursive function, which implements Lisp.