I mentioned it to illustrate my point, that semantics and other aspects matter much more than syntax in many cases.
(Btw Clojure does have a ML / stats ecosystem, in part via the JVM, though certainly not as developed as Python / Julia / R. For instance, Anglican is a probabilistic programming language embedded in Clojure: https://github.com/probprog/anglican).
> For someone using math, "programmability" and the other aspects you mention are certainly higher in a language that emulates how we think about the problems.
Sure, but syntax is just about notation - semantics are much more important to achieving nearness to a mental model. If you can't express your mental model in another notation than the one you're familiar with, then you probably don't have a very deep understanding of said model.
Continuing with my example, prefix notation for matrix multiplication does not hurt _at all_ my ability to reason about linear algebra - it sometimes even clarifies it.
I also think you misinterpret what I meant by programmability, which is not the same thing as 'ease of programming' - more like how smoothly various parts of a program interact. If for the sake of syntactic sugar you've introduced a proliferation of different programming constructs with no unifying abstraction, then the other parts of the program will need to make a proliferation of case distinctions as well - that's one way to hurt programmability.