Well, it actually is the case, it's just that they've built out the core library with a ton of functionality; intermingling the actual Clojure keywords (there's only ~17 of them) with the convenience macros and functions built up from those two primitives. Someone wrote all of those functions and macros. Hundreds of functions and macros were built by the language creators to give the functionality of a complex language.

> Not that much is implemented in macros.

74 of the functions exposed in the core api alone are macros. Perhaps the most often used one is "defn" (and somewhat ironically "defmacro").

And this is exactly what is wrong with Clojure and its community. An unexplainable lack of ability to embrace macros and all the power they can bring.

I could never understand a single anti-macro argument, they are all too detached from the reality.