I believe it's hyped because is a more practical/modern lisp. I don't think it provides more fundamental benefits than any other lisp than access to a plethora

I believe it's hyped because is a more practical/modern lisp. I don't think it provides more fundamental benefits than any other lisp than access to a plethora of standard Java libraries. E.g. I cannot Java, but knowing clojure has allowed me to maintain a large inherited Java codebase. Afaik I could not have done that in common lisp (and not only because I don't know cl). I think almost everything is harder when you are not using lisp. Also lisp tends to bring joy to its users for some reason, so there is that. Finally there is a huge difference between Python and clojure data wrangling. Pandas and spark are fundamentally table oriented, but if you are using nested dictionaries (clojure maps) you do not have those tools to help you. No matter what I was doing in clojure, it always involved processing nested maps, it's just the natural approach in the language, kinda like using classes in Java. Hope I managed to clarify something :)