I can think of three things that may have helped Clojure avoid this issue, at least relative to other Lisps: 1. It shipped with a substantial set of features,

I can think of three things that may have helped Clojure avoid this issue, at least relative to other Lisps: 1. It shipped with a substantial set of features, either in core from day one or as a function of being hosted on the JVM, that programmers would otherwise have been likely to build themselves in multiple, potentially incompatible ways. 2. The syntax is simple, and Clojure doesn’t allow user-defined reader macros, so libraries can’t introduce new syntax. There may be more than one way to do it, but you should at least know how to read all of them. 3. It’s only ever been under the stewardship of one cautious, opinionated developer. Of course, from another perspective, all of these could be (and I’m sure have been) seen as weaknesses.