That's the main cultural difference between clojure and CL. Clojure wants to be a broad language with concrete syntatic support for many data structures. CL is

That's the main cultural difference between clojure and CL. Clojure wants to be a broad language with concrete syntatic support for many data structures. CL is a tall language with fewer syntax than data structures; you can have vectors in literal sytnax, #(1 2 3), but you can also create them explicitly: (vector 1 2 3). Hashtables can only be created explicitly: (make-hash-table) then (setf (gethash "one" *) 1) but you're free to create your own syntax or shortcuts, which is what Alexandria provides: (hash-table-alist '(("one" 1) ("two" 2) ("three" 3)))