I also tried getting into Clojure around that time. I was coming from CL where we have nice things like conditions and restarts, dynamic variables, and CLOS -- being able to hit an error in the debugger, inspect the slot of the instance of some object that caused the error and recompile the class definition to fix the error without restarting the program is really nice (all of the running instances are updated). I was not used to Clojure's unhelpful tracebacks.

I don't understand what age has to do with anything... CL is still a good language.