Clojure for Lisp Programmers

http://blip.tv/clojure/clojure-for-lisp-programmers-part-1-1319721
http://blip.tv/clojure/clojure-for-lisp-programmers-part-2-1319826

It's a great talk. I've seen many people on /prog/ groundlessly criticizing Clojure, and it's sad. It this presentation Rich Hickey addresses all their points and provides a coherent rationale behind Clojure and its various ``unusual" design decisions. Despite being quite lengthy it doesn't get tedious as it quickly jumps from topic to topic, sometimes with interesting questions form the crowd between the jumps. You should definitely watch this video before forming your opinion about Clojure.

syntax-rules: syntax-rules

Explicit renaming: er-macro-transformer

Syntactic closures: sc-macro-transformer make-syntactic-closure capture-syntactic-environment

syntax-case: syntax-case syntax datum->syntax syntax->datum identifier? bound-identifier=? free-identifier=?

Common Lisp: symbol-package gensym *gensym-counter* intern unintern