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Lisp advocates think that "everything looks the same" is an advantage, whereas most people strive desperately to make things look different in informative ways with syntactic features (e.g. different brackets) and syntax highlighting.


That's one of the advantages of Clojure: it's lisp-inspired but with different brackets for different data structures.


One of the reasons it has those data structures is because it sits on the JVM and to maintain compatibility with Java apps it must use them and provide a syntax for them. That’s a practical choice, of course, but also less of an idiomatic lisp.

In (pure) lisp there is only one main data structure and it’s everywhere.


Java doesn’t have maps or whatnot, as proved by many other lisp dialects being written for the JVM.

Clojure’s decision was of practical importance and a very good one at that (not everything is a list, especially not semantically)




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