They're not hygienic, but the usage of auto-gemsyms on quasi-quote and the fact that symbols are automatically expanded to their namespaced forms solves most of the problems that unhygienic macros have: http://clojure-doc.org/articles/language/macros.html#macro-h...

All of the features mentioned seemed to be in favor of Clojure, like it doesn't mention the lack of CLOS and conditions/restarts, which were both major eye openers for me in learning Common Lisp. Just a personal point, I much prefer macros in CL as well.

There are parts of Clojure I like, such as the data structures and de-structuring. Maybe it was primarily the JVM, but I just couldn't get into Clojure...it doesn't give the same feeling as working in CL. I really wanted to like it though.

I do wish that someone would take some of the modern data structure ideas and backport them to Common Lisp (as a new lisp obviously). The historical cruft in lisp and lack a strong modern standard library are major reasons I don't play with it day-to-day.