[Elrac]

I'm not exactly a Rubyist, but I really like Ruby. One of the things I like about it is its orthogonality: the concepts you learn work identically or similarly in different places, for different object types (where possible) so a relatively small handful of syntax + ideas + the library docs give you a running start at any program.

The same applies to Clojure. There's laughably little syntax to learn, and once you've got that under your belt you're just composing functions.

I'm not made to feel I've wasted a lot of memory space on the esoterics unique to some particular language. Clojure works for me rather than the other way around. This no-nonsense obviousness was one of Matz' design goals for Ruby, and clearly ditto for McCarthy and Hickey.

[bkurtz13]

This is called homoiconicity[0] and it's one of Clojure's coolest features in my opinion.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity

[dopamean]

The concept of homoiconicity has yet to really sink in for me. Conceptually, I understand what it means and I can explain it to others but I have yet to really understand it in a practical sense.

[samatman]

Imagine if, instead of Javascript, you had a language based on JSON, with a few additional types, notably a 'symbol' type and a 'list' type. A few of the symbols are primitives that determine the semantics of the list type, allowing other symbols to be defined as functions.

That's homoiconicity, and Clojure strongly resembles an actual implementation of this conceit.