Right, and that's the point. Though, I suppose it'd be easy enough to create a code walker which renamed everything unless the symbol started with % or somethin

Right, and that's the point. Though, I suppose it'd be easy enough to create a code walker which renamed everything unless the symbol started with % or something. That, in my opinion is sort of the beauty of Clojure's macro system. By default, all symbols referred to are expanded to there FQN unless of course you use unquote. My guess is that Byrd's problem with that is that it's not really a hygiene solution so much as it is a system which takes full advantage of 2 things--Clojure vars are immutable and namespaces are unique.