I disagree with any notion that Lisp would be better with static typing. Types are (mostly) for the compiler to worry about :) . But if you want a statically-typed version of Common Lisp, there are probably a few libraries that can give you that.
There's a perception on websites like HN and Reddit that Common Lisp is super hard to understand and it's this exclusive thing, but I feel the exact opposite way. I think people think it's this exclusive thing because 1. they never used it 2. their only perception of a Lisp is a Scheme (which is not Lisp, because it's Scheme), which is a bit of an ivory-tower hacker language, to be honest, because it gives you so little to work with (and it's intentionally less flexible, less friendly to use, in the name of simplicity). I think Common Lisp is very much not.
Common Lisp tends to be written in this pretty verbose style (with long, descriptive names for everything, since a name can be anything up to 1024-characters) that utilizes the fact that functions, variables, etc are in different namespaces pretty heavily (so you can freely reuse names of existing things, in a scope, where appropriate), because the point is that the code will be read by humans first and machines last. Reliance on context is thought of as a bad thing by a lot of programmers, but humans are very good at resolving things by context, and Common Lisp's syntactical regularity makes it very trivial to know what things are what.
Macros are difficult to write for a beginner, but there are really only a few rules to keep in mind when writing basic ones (which are most of what many will write). Other people's macros end up being readable, even when you don't quite know what those rules are, because they're written in a descriptive way.
It's common to see people say something along the lines of "Lisp encourages programmers to write their own mutually unintelligible dialects of the language to solve their problems" but I find it pretty easy to read other people's (contemporary) code in Common Lisp. I do find it quite difficult to read Scheme code that comprises of a million nested lambdas all with vague, single-letter variable names, though.
I've no idea what Clojure is like, so maybe that's massively more complicated and that's coloring your perception, but I don't know. I think Common Lisp has pretty good ergonomics as-is (except all the legacy, leftover bloat in the standard, and awkwardness that arises with CLOS not being as well integrated with the rest of the language as it could).
There's a perception on websites like HN and Reddit that Common Lisp is super hard to understand and it's this exclusive thing, but I feel the exact opposite way. I think people think it's this exclusive thing because 1. they never used it 2. their only perception of a Lisp is a Scheme (which is not Lisp, because it's Scheme), which is a bit of an ivory-tower hacker language, to be honest, because it gives you so little to work with (and it's intentionally less flexible, less friendly to use, in the name of simplicity). I think Common Lisp is very much not.
Common Lisp tends to be written in this pretty verbose style (with long, descriptive names for everything, since a name can be anything up to 1024-characters) that utilizes the fact that functions, variables, etc are in different namespaces pretty heavily (so you can freely reuse names of existing things, in a scope, where appropriate), because the point is that the code will be read by humans first and machines last. Reliance on context is thought of as a bad thing by a lot of programmers, but humans are very good at resolving things by context, and Common Lisp's syntactical regularity makes it very trivial to know what things are what.
Macros are difficult to write for a beginner, but there are really only a few rules to keep in mind when writing basic ones (which are most of what many will write). Other people's macros end up being readable, even when you don't quite know what those rules are, because they're written in a descriptive way.
It's common to see people say something along the lines of "Lisp encourages programmers to write their own mutually unintelligible dialects of the language to solve their problems" but I find it pretty easy to read other people's (contemporary) code in Common Lisp. I do find it quite difficult to read Scheme code that comprises of a million nested lambdas all with vague, single-letter variable names, though.
I've no idea what Clojure is like, so maybe that's massively more complicated and that's coloring your perception, but I don't know. I think Common Lisp has pretty good ergonomics as-is (except all the legacy, leftover bloat in the standard, and awkwardness that arises with CLOS not being as well integrated with the rest of the language as it could).