To a degree, yes. But that's because CL is roughly speaking the set union of all Lisps available in the '80s. Scheme was off doing its own thing, and knew it.

To a degree, yes. But that's because CL is roughly speaking the set union of all Lisps available in the '80s. Scheme was off doing its own thing, and knew it. Even today, languages make it clear where they're coming from. The claim to fame of Clojure is that it's a) a Lisp that b) uses FP to make many things easier, notably but not exclusively concurrency (and, as a result of the FP focus, a big difference between Clojure and other Lisps is that by default it uses immutable data structures) and c) runs on the JVM. Note that the emphasis on FP is something Clojurians use to draw in Lispers from other dialects. Similar arguments could be made for Shen, Qi, etc. The unique selling proposition of Lisp as a whole is that it's homoiconicity lets you treat code as data and exploit that using macros and such. Racket illustrates this beautifully--from what I've seen it's common for a library to introduce new syntax and such. The unique selling proposition of Lisp is not that it's darn good at functional programming--that's just a very fortunate side-effect.