[lmm]

"imperative" does not seem like a good/valuable characterization. Yes, the "do" form is imperative. That's why you're not supposed to use it much, perhaps only for the top-level structure of your program, the part that acts as an interpreter to connect the pure program to the outside world. When you express business logic in a language like clojure, that expression of the business logic is not usually "a sequence of commands executed in order". It usually looks more like "an expression tree and rules for how nodes are evaluated".

The downside of a simple, transparent language like lisp is that it exposes you to the dangerous parts of the underlying. An opaque abstraction (e.g. expressing database operations as a tree of operations some of which define transaction boundaries, rather than as a series of SQL commands some of which open or close transactions) is vital for transforming dangerous things into safe things. Ultimately a program looks like an expression of business-level logic and then an opaque layer that pretends the computer is actually a machine that understands your business. Lisp forces you to provide more of that opacity yourself, whereas a language that already has a vocabulary for drawing distinctions between different kinds of thing provides you some of the scaffolding you need (the tradeoff being of course that it will be less specialized to your particular circumstances).