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There is a big difference between design and bug fixes. There are many small tickets with bug fixes already written that have not been merged into Clojure citing Rich’s time. Sometimes months or years go by, even when the Jira thread includes supporting comments from Alex Miller at Cognitect. Small fixes that improve the language without altering its design, making core functions more stable with edges cases, and they never make it into the language.

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quoting _halgari from June 2016(on clojure)[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11884028]:

> Something that is often very hard to understand (it took me years to do so). Is that maintaining a language is insanely hard. Everything has a cost. Let me give a good example: A few years back someone submitted a patch that improved the error messages in Clojure. Worked great, just a single extra "if" and a message. It was committed to master. Then people's code got way slower. Why? Well this was a often used function and that single if blew the JVM inline budget causing that function to never be inlined. And that improvement had to he yanked out.

That’s a new feature. I am talking about bug fixes... I reiterate: big difference.

a code change is still a code change.

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