If I hate all food but pancakes, then my opinion on steak is hardly relevant.
I dislike Clojure because it is a cheap knock-off of Common Lisp, with no upsides that I'm aware of - besides trendiness. The article mentions one serious flaw - Clojure barfs Java stack traces, instead of serious debug information (the way Common Lisp does - with restarts, etc.) Another flaw is the lack of reader macros. But what is the point of listing said flaws? I could go on and on, and no one will care a whit. Why? Because Clojure is a product of immature minds who piss on the past work of serious people (the Common Lisp community) simply for the sake of faux-novelty. In this, it resembles Newlisp and other backwards steps disguised as progress. It is, in fact, best understood as yet another product of the idiotic language-of-the-day mentality which gave us Dylan, Python, Ruby, and the many other shoddy "infix Lisps."
> hates all languages that aren't the Symbolics flavour of common lisp
This is patently untrue, as anyone who actually bothers to read my articles knows well. Symbolics (or rather, the MIT Lisp machine architecture their products were based on) was simply an example of a Lisp system done well. Clojure, a thin veneer on the Java cesspool, is not. To run with your analogy, I am a lover of steak, who is upset by tofu peddlers' success in passing off their cheap trash as real meat.
In my opinion, Clojure doesn't try to one-up Lisp. Rich Hickey recognizes the great value of Lisp and wants to share these features with a wider audience -- I can't say I would have ever taken an interest in Lisp if it weren't for Clojure in fact.
Check out Clojure's rationale page (http://clojure.org/rationale). Rich says he wanted a language that is:
*A Lisp
*for Functional Programming
*symbiotic with an established Platform
*designed for Concurrency
I think you misunderstand the designers of these new languages. Most of them aren't trying to make something "trendy" (that should be obvious by how many esoteric hobby languages there are). They are trying to solve problems. And if some people other than the author of the language can get some use along the way, well then that's just great.
Clojure isn't the product of "immature minds" either. It's the product of one mind, and one that's spent many years thinking about good language design and many years working with software in industry.
Gratuitous reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80662 (checkout pg's first comment on that post )
Symbolics was the future. CS has in many ways regressed since then, mostly because of the stupendous success of worse-is-better unix/c mindset coupled with lack of DARPA funding ,the AI winter & the rise of cheap wintel cpu's. At Goldman Sachs, I was incredibly fortunate to work alongside one of the original Symbolics guys ( listed here: http://www.asl.dsl.pipex.com/symbolics/legacy.html ). He complained long and hard about how the c/c++/java family of PLs were "absolute shit" and OOP was doomed from the get go and why functional will be back someday. This was back in the 1999-2000 timeframe when Sun was in the driver's seat and everywhere you looked, it was OOP or bust. Now, ten years hence, functional is all the rage, and you've got clojure, functional java, scala, several functional JS libs...all that's old is new once again! Who knows, with all this VC $$$ searching for a home, we might actually see the resurgence of a LISP Machine. Symbolics 2.0 FTW!!!
See this thread on my site, the story of how I kicked the Mathematica habit:
What tool do people use to write Lisp Web code? Is it GNU Emacs or something else? How compatible are Emacs List and SBCL?