Forgive me. The term 'hygenic macro' has historically been associated with Lisp and Scheme which were not known for the availability of type information at compile time, because they are dynamically typed and often did not have a compile time.
Fair enough. Clojure really is a wonderful language. It's sort of a "Javascript: The Good Parts" for Lisp - they kept (and expanded on) that wonderful expressiveness, while doing away with 50 years of dogma that held on to stuff like gen-syms, car, cdr, and singly-linked lists as the one-true-datatype.
It's really not so bad. At least for simple-medium sized projects you can basically ignore the JVM. The leiningen build tool means you never have to tough maven/ivy/ant/etc
