[cturner]

The books I learnt lisp from emphasised recursion early, and were taught from a perspective of emphasising the power of the language and tricks available to programmers. This approach encourages arcana, similar to bit-shifting tricks you'd find in C books like _Hacker's Delight_ (Warren). Through lisp macros (present in Clojure), you can create your own sub-language.

So merely through the absence of this emphasis on expressive power, Clojure is a bit different. And I think that's great. I might be using Clojure at the moment, except I need to be able to make native builds for the project I'm working on, and so I went with Racket.

Yeah, people are weirded out by the syntax as well. Which is sad, because people who are used to it tend to love it. But if this was the only problem, it could have been easily bypassed decades ago with a whitespace alternative. That is, where developers would be able to denote blocks with python-style whitespace and colons as an alternative to parens. Last time I mentioned this someone pointed me to a distribution of arc that already did it.

    > many of the standard lib functions are themselves
    > written recursively

Maybe the JVM has been updated while I wasn't looking and no longer has a problem with deep recursion. What are some stdlib functions that are recursive?

[cgag]

The JVM still doesn't do tail call optimization but Clojure has a special form, recur, that you can only use in tail position and doesn't use consume stack space. An example: https://gist.github.com/4493547 (loop is like let but works with recur).

A simple one from the standard lib is last: https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/clj/cloju...