While Janet pulls from a few inspirations, the syntax is pure Clojure. I always figured that it was trying fix up the bumpy parts in Fennel to enable a programming style that was more consistently Clojure-like and functional than could be done in Fennel, since Fennel ultimately has to use Lua's semantics because Fennel compiles to Lua.
It's a bit harder as Fennel can produce pure functions, whereas basically everything in Janet's standard library outputs mutable structures etc. Janet style tends towards (elegant) imperative programming.
