[brudgers]

As a beginning language Scheme and especially Racket are better designed languages. There's nothing of significance in Common Lisp that's better for a beginner and much in Scheme and Racket that is.

If I was going to move away from Scheme and Racket for vocational reasons but stay within the Lisp family I'd give strong consideration to eLisp since it touches on toolmaking. Clojure would be a second choice because it touches on imperative programming and library use.

[lispm]

I learned Scheme first. I still find that experience great.

But I moved then to Common Lisp and think that learning Common Lisp from the beginning is much better. Common Lisp is much better suited to write software than Scheme or even Racket. A good Common Lisp implementation has much better tools.

At the University we had a site license of Allegro CL from Franz, Inc.. Every student had access to it via the SUN cluster. That was a revelation to me. These tools were so much better to use and for learning.

[brudgers]

Common Lisp is better than Scheme or Racket in the same sorts of ways that Clojure is better. It's a full on professional tool. But it doesn't have Felleisen's Student Languages or Htdp/universe out of the box to facilitate teaching like Racket.

I've never explored Franz/Allegro because CCL and SBCL etc. carry less baggage because of their FOSS pedigree...it's a bias more against demo/evaluation versions than closed source.

[lispm]

I doubt that either Racket or Clojure are comparable. Racket is not professional tool - it's an educational tool. Clojure is a more or less thin layer over Java.