Exactly. When he says So under its expressive covers, everything about Clojure is strongly conservative, with a core overriding bias towards protecting

Exactly. When he says So under its expressive covers, everything about Clojure is strongly conservative, with a core overriding bias towards protecting programmers from mistakes. he's probably talking about macros and the focus on immutability/FP. With respect to macros, I really don't get why he interpreted Christophe Grand's presentation like that unless he walked away after the first two slides or so (and even then it's a stretch). Rich Hickey debunked his statement on macros very well here on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366661 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366661) - the view Christophe expresses is precisely the opposite of conservative: it's about increasing composability and flexibility, very liberal attributes by Yegge's own definition. Although "protecting programmers from mistakes" is definitely one side of FP/immutability, I seem to recall Rich and others arguing for it more in terms of reducing the cognitive overhead of programming by reducing incidental complexity - not having to hold as many things in your head while thinking about your system allows your brain to handle bigger systems and move faster. Removing mental obstacles for the programmer who is impatient to create furiously seems pretty damn liberal to me. I had fun reading Yegge's post, as with most of his posts. But the part about Clojure really missed the mark. Which is a shame, given Yegge's arguing for lisp in the past and Clojure being a really cool, viable lisp for getting stuff done in the 21st century.