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>Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. [0]

Neither the Clojure page, nor its users seem to agree with you.

I think the typical argument goes something along the lines of, "it uses []{} and doesn't make cons the default data structure, abandoning some simplicity-of-language."

Aren't the brackets/braces just sugar?

It's not Lisp-as-in-Common-Lisp. It's closer to Scheme than to CL.

But it's "a Lisp" in the colloquial sense that it uses s-expression syntax and has macros.

Not s-expressions in the traditional Lisp definition of singly linked lists. In Lisp (a . b) is a cons cell with two symbols a and b. In Clojure it is some complex data structure with three elements a, ., and b.

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