You may already have heard about those things - but I just thought I'd mention them on the off-chance you haven't.

Personally I find the syntax a lot easier to read - less giving up syntax than eliminating what's always looked like a bit of a mess to me ^^ Though, horses for course maybe, as you say.

That is there always seems to be at least as much of a subtext of Clojure defining itself by what it isn't as an explicit statement of what Clojure is. So much of what is said about it is said in the context of "Clojure is not Java, or Haskell, or Scala, or Scheme, or Common Lisp" and because that is so much a part of its culture, it has details drawn from 'the best parts' of each and mashed up.

Like Common Lisp, it is a language for working programmers and will trade practical accretion over striving for internal conceptual consistency. Unlike Common Lisp or Scheme, it doesn't have the sort of simple core that lends itself to tutorials from first principles and even if it did, the community tends to be experienced where just jumping into the middle is more the norm.

That's nothing against Clojure. It's just that any sort of gentle introduction to Lisp is probably better sought in those places where it already exists - SICP or the Racket ecosystem or Practical Common Lisp or PG's On Lisp are probably better introductions to what makes Lisp different. Clojure is probably a better second Lisp dialect for many people once they are ready for full tilt production code.

loop/recur is of course much less powerful than TCO, because the JVM doesn't natively support it (it's not trivial, security wise). There are three other Lisps on the JVM that I know of: SISC Scheme is mostly dead but does TCO at a cost in speed, Kawa Scheme has as of late added fine grain control over TCO, and Armed Bear Common Lisp doesn't try, as Common Lisps are not required to.

But loop/recur sure looks to be ultimately inspired by Scheme style use of TCO; I just did a set of functions using it for the first time and everything I learned from SICP/6.001 applied and made that part of it trivial.

> But loop/recur sure looks to be ultimately inspired by Scheme style use of TCO;

To me it looks more like ancient Lisp with prog and goto.

    (defun foo ()
      (prog ((a 1))
        start
        (print a)
        (when (< a 10)
          (incf a)
          (go start))))

Is there something in particular you're having a hard time with, out of curiosity? I don't consider myself particularly brilliant but I didn't have a year's worth of trouble with Clojure.