I think the biggest reason would be Clojure's macro system. The code itself is an abstract syntax tree that you can rewrite in arbitrary fashion at macro expans

I think the biggest reason would be Clojure's macro system. The code itself is an abstract syntax tree that you can rewrite in arbitrary fashion at macro expansion time. There's a good example here of how Clojure's macros are more powerful/expressive than Ruby's instance_eval and class_eval: http://daveyarwood.github.io/2014/07/09/whys-guide-to-ruby-in-clojure-part-5/ http://daveyarwood.github.io/2014/07/09/whys-guide-to-ruby-i... And here's an attempt to objectively rank programming languages by expressiveness, measured as lines of code changed per commit: http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/03/25/programming-languages-ranked-by-expressiveness/ http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/03/25/programming-language...