> it feels like Clojure went all liberal on one end, just to get super-conservative on the other. In the brief time that I used Clojure, I also thought that th

> it feels like Clojure went all liberal on one end, just to get super-conservative on the other. In the brief time that I used Clojure, I also thought that the contrast between immutability and dynamic typing was very strange. Ultimately, I think it makes more sense than having the entire language be highly dynamic (or highly static). I think Clojure's choice is not inconsistency, but that there is a kind of budget for craziness in a language. In Clojure, you can go crazy with dynamic types on the foundation of immutability, transactions, etc. In Haskell, you can go crazy with really awesome static typing tricks that would be utterly unfathomable if the language wasn't very rigid in every other way -- immutable, referentially transparent, side-effect-tracking. These two pack all their craziness into one corner of the language. On the other hand, other languages -- Python, Javascript, Ruby -- seem to spread the craziness (I am not sure I picked the best word for this!) around, instead of having one super dynamic feature and everything else very inflexible. These languages tend to lack the really big flashy features: macros, typeclasses, etc. It seems that you have a lot of flexibility as a language designer on how you spend your craziness budget, as long as you don't go too high (and become incomprehensible) or too low (Java?).