If there could be said to be one overriding design philosophy in Caribou it is that everything in Caribou is data. Pages are data. Locales are data. The data schema itself is data that can be manipulated the same as any other data. The arguments to all of the core Caribou functions are data, and don't use any macros or keyword arguments or syntactic sugar of any kind.
This is intentional, because if everything is data everything can be controlled programmatically. In a way, this philosophy is an extension of the basic Lisp philosophy that programs themselves are data that can be constructed using the same data primitives that programs use to manipulate any other data structures. This is why Caribou uses Clojure in the first place, because Clojure is a Lisp and Lisp was created around the concept of code as data. The entire design of Lisp originally was to create the simplest language where the code could be manipulated by the code itself. Everything else in Lisp's design flows from a dedication to this simple idea. There have been countless incarnations each with their own angle, their own approach and philosophy, but the core has always remained true to this notion of code as data, and it is why Lisp is not any one of its implementations, but something beyond all of them.
We believe this timeless notion is not just beautiful, but practical, and we are grateful that the existence of Clojure allows us to follow through with the original possibilities of code as data to its full implications in terms of EVERYTHING as data. Our goal is to allow this potential, that any aspect of the system is able to be harnessed programmatically, reach its ultimate realization.