[tastyminerals2]

I have to admit, several years ago, a colleague of mine advised me if not to try Clojure but at least to read the "History of Clojure": https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321, which I never did. But one day I decided to watch Rich Hickey - Greatest Hits https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits... I then read the "History of Clojure", and then jumped into learning it. This is probably one of the most fun languages to build with and one of the most beautiful ones. If not syntax-wise, rather in a way it allows you to express your thoughts via good design and composition that so nicely tickles your brain. If you are still searching for that one shiny tool, and none of them clicks, maybe try Clojure. It's one of the most concise and yet powerful languages I've seen.

[ryan-duve]

I got what you described by learning Common Lisp just a few months ago. Do you think learning Clojure would get me something in addition to that or is it roughly the same?

[iLemming]

> Do you think learning Clojure would get me something in addition to that

For me, the biggest benefit is that it's hosted. Learning only Clojure, I can easily today write for JVM, .NET, JavaScript, Flutter, or shell scripts. Even when I need to write Lua, I'd usually pick Fennel. It's not Clojure but feels very similar. There are libs that can give you Python or R interop from Clojure. There are projects to target Golang, Rust or Erlang. Jank is a super interesting, experimental implementation of Clojure that runs on LLVM, I'm very excited about it. Do you want to become a true polyglot programmer? You only need to learn Clojure.

[rtpg]

I think Clojure leans into immutability a lot, and that leads to more interesting APIs and norms that are valuable. CL has always felt a bit more.... "running on a machine" that I feel has less of a place in an era where everyone and their dog has functional programming essentials built in.

Clojure is interesting, but some Clojure APIs (stuff like Spectre) is "I want this everywhere now" stuff.

[didibus]

Clojure also teaches you functional programming, where-as CL only teaches you the LISP beauty. Clojure teaches you both Lisp and Fp. So the FP part should still be worth it even though you got the Lisp part from CL.

[tmountain]

Depends on your style of programming CL. Clojure is immutable by default with a heavy emphasis on concurrency and strong ties to the JVM as its host environment. The differences you’ll find mostly lie in those areas.

[epgui]

IMO, Clojure is superficially/syntactically much more elegant and beautiful than Common Lisp or Scheme. I find this really helps you focus on what matters most.

[silcoon]

really good talk from Rich Hickey: Clojure for Lisp Programmers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPNkH-7PRTk&t=3837s

[vindarel]

Besides the superficial syntax, those are some differences pointed out by (common) lispers: https://gist.github.com/vindarel/3484a4bcc944a5be143e74bfae1...

[wedesoft]

Clojure uses immutable lists, vectors, hashmaps, and sets. Also it has syntax sugar such as [1 2 3] for vectors, {"Jan" 31 "Feb" 28} for hashmaps, #{1 2 3} for sets, and much more. Also it has multimethods which are even more generic than CLOS.