S-expressions != "lisp" There is the Common Lisp standard, and those variants really are managed like C compilers are. It's pretty great, and the differences a

S-expressions != "lisp" There is the Common Lisp standard, and those variants really are managed like C compilers are. It's pretty great, and the differences are tiny. Scheme has standards -- but yes, due to the language's easy implementation many people have made implementations of varying adherence to that standard. This is a good problem, it means people are able to implement their own languages. Finally - clojure's rationale is pretty straight forward, and has obviously met an incredible niche in the PL space. I don't think it's that controversial of an implementation of S-exps.