[Kodiologist]

Well, this is a little embarrassing: Clojure was one of the biggest influences on Hy in its youth, but that was mostly before I got involved in 2016. I never actually learned Clojure. So hopefully somebody who knows both Hy and Clojure well can answer. I can tell you that at run-time, Hy is essentially Python code, so Hy is more tightly coupled to Python than Clojure is to Java; a better analogy is CoffeeScript's relationship with JavaScript.

I get the impression that Clojure tries to convince the programmer to avoid side-effects a lot more strenuously than Hy does, but it's still not a purely functional language, so I don't know how consequential that is in practice.

[a57721]

Clojure has a good collection library with immutable/persistent data structures, but as a language it allows side effects and has some mechanisms to manage them. It is also possible to call any Java method from Clojure.

Clojure does not work with Java ASTs, it translates into JVM bytecode directly.