In the spirit of highlighting other, non-Clojure, lisps to look at, I'll mention Racket.
Compared to Clojure:
- Not hosted (on JVM)
- Similar disposition on nudging you toward functional programming
- Less syntactic sugar (some of Clojure's sugar I find nice, but is divisive for some)
- Older
Compared to CL:
- One canonical implementation. This is good (consistency) and bad (choice, variety)
- More biased toward functional programming than CL
- People seem to think Racket's macros are more powerful than CL's, but I'm no macro-master
- Package management (raco) feels much more pleasant, subjectively, to me.
- Develop in Emacs or DrRacket; the latter being a pretty decent IDE for newcomers and others who'd haven't seen the true light of Emacs.
- Newer, feels newer
I started carving off small chunks of time a few years ago to try and hear the music of the spheres everyone talks about with lisps. I started with CL, then tried Clojure, and have mainly been dabbling in Racket these days. Subjectively, Racket has been the best beginner experience by far. As for hearing the music of the spheres, I'm still waiting.
EDIT: I forgot Rackjure! Racket is also a framework for building new languages (languages that are compatible with Racket, generally). Rackjure adds some of the Clojure-isms to Racket and seems to be used by a number of packages
Also, Typed Racket is another such variant of Racket that uses types for safety and performance reasons.
Compared to Clojure:
- Not hosted (on JVM)
- Similar disposition on nudging you toward functional programming
- Less syntactic sugar (some of Clojure's sugar I find nice, but is divisive for some)
- Older
Compared to CL:
- One canonical implementation. This is good (consistency) and bad (choice, variety)
- More biased toward functional programming than CL
- People seem to think Racket's macros are more powerful than CL's, but I'm no macro-master
- Package management (raco) feels much more pleasant, subjectively, to me.
- Develop in Emacs or DrRacket; the latter being a pretty decent IDE for newcomers and others who'd haven't seen the true light of Emacs.
- Newer, feels newer
I started carving off small chunks of time a few years ago to try and hear the music of the spheres everyone talks about with lisps. I started with CL, then tried Clojure, and have mainly been dabbling in Racket these days. Subjectively, Racket has been the best beginner experience by far. As for hearing the music of the spheres, I'm still waiting.
EDIT: I forgot Rackjure! Racket is also a framework for building new languages (languages that are compatible with Racket, generally). Rackjure adds some of the Clojure-isms to Racket and seems to be used by a number of packages
Also, Typed Racket is another such variant of Racket that uses types for safety and performance reasons.