Using 'macros' is no substitute for having taste. The Clojure developer had a certain vision for a new language - otherwise he could have just continued to use

Using 'macros' is no substitute for having taste. The Clojure developer had a certain vision for a new language - otherwise he could have just continued to use Lisp (which he earlier used for a few years). It might be useful to respect that and develop Clojure along this vision. Something like Common Lisp follows a different vision. Common Lisp was a large community effort and the language EXPLICITLY had been designed to be morphed by the user into widely different shapes. That's why it reserves characters to the user, why it has a programmable reader, why it has procedural macros, ..., and why CLOS has a Meta Object Protocol. Probably that was also too much flexibility. But even with Common Lisp, because it gives you little guidance how to use it and there are a gazillion programming styles possible, you need to develop taste. You can design ugly code and extensions and you can learn to develop better code and extensions. Common Lisp supports LOOP, because it was already there (it was introduced with Interlisp in the 70s, then brought to Maclisp and Lisp Machine Lisp) and there wasn't a better alternative at that time. The 'best' iteration construct in the Lisp world is Jonathan Amsterdam's Iterate. But that would also not fit well into Clojure... But Iterate fits well into Common Lisp and works nicely as an alternative to LOOP.