Comment by joshlemer

And the reason that LISP code tends to be reluctant to split things out into multiple forms with variable assignment IMO is because it introduces a new level of nesting. It's too much friction to go from

    (defn foo [] 
       (+ 1 2))

to

    (defn foo []
      (let [x 2]
         (+ 1 x)))

I wish that there were some kind of macro available in Clojure that would provide a local "def" kind of functionality that doesn't pollute the namespace and just creates a binding in the parent scope. So that you could do something like:

    (defn foo []
       (let! x 2) 
       (+ 1 x))