[hawkeyedan]

A little more context… This is a real decision I’m making with Common Lisp, Guile and Janet as my current leading options.

But … I feel like documenting all the thoughts in an essay/blog form may be helpful to others.

(And my post history will show I’ve gone down this path before. Trying again. Since last time I gave up due to the paradox of choice.)

[_xiaz]

With Lisp the paradox of choice is especially unwarranted since moving between lisps is even easier than say moving between dynamically typed scripting langauges.

Learning Guile for 4 weeks and then do CL for 2 leaves you no worse than doing CL for 5.

If you care about practical first and foremost, CL and Clojure both beat Guile by a landslide.

Guile is marginally prettier and more fun.

Clojure has perhaps the strongest FP emphasis and you may view the JVM more favourably than I do. Rich Hickeys talks are a gem whether you pick Clojure or not.

[fulafel]

Pick the real world programming task that you'd want to tackle and experiment, there's a point of diminishing returns from just reading stuff. You can also then get better advice on forums based on questions or problems that you run into.