This list doesn't strike me as the important things that Clojure is missing. They're all relatively minor matters. There are several other things that I would consider much more important.
I've gone on at some length about those things before (for example, see my long comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22318748, ), so I won't repeat it here.
I'll just say that Clojure is pretty nice as far as it goes, and I like it when it's the right tool for the job, but I feel like it's only halfway to being a proper Lisp. Whenever I work in it for very long I always miss more complete Lisps, and I daydream about a Clojure with the missing pieces filled in.
That's a fair response. I've thought about working on a Clojure implementation on a Common Lisp runtime, precisely because I'd like to see a Clojure that is a real, proper Lisp.
But so far I haven't actually done any work in that direction. When I work on interpreters and compilers, I generally work on trying to improve upon Common Lisp, rather than trying to help Clojure catch up to it.
Years ago, in the early 1990s, I worked on an experimental OS at Apple. It was written mostly in a Lisp called Ralph (which later evolved into Dylan). Ralph was basically Scheme's kernel operations on top of data types built on CLOS with some functional-programming idioms.
Ralph had all of the nice things I was pining for in that post that I previously linked, but it was also a smaller, simpler, and more consistent language than Common Lisp, and it was easier to learn and easier to extend.
I've been working for years now on a language that started as a Ralph embedded in Common Lisp, but which has mutated quite a bit over the years as I learned new things and experimented with adding them to my implementations. It's been complete enough for me to ship a few products with it, but it's not done, and lately I've been inclined to steer it more back toward Ralph.
Mostly. There are still a few newer features I might like to keep.
So, while I acknowledge that it's totally fair of you to exhort me to work on Clojure, and it's not necessarily a bad idea, there is another Lisp for me to work on that is dearer to me.
I've gone on at some length about those things before (for example, see my long comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22318748, ), so I won't repeat it here.
I'll just say that Clojure is pretty nice as far as it goes, and I like it when it's the right tool for the job, but I feel like it's only halfway to being a proper Lisp. Whenever I work in it for very long I always miss more complete Lisps, and I daydream about a Clojure with the missing pieces filled in.