[the_watcher]

> the language tries to drive me to the cleanest solution

This is really appealing to me. I've hacked a bit with Ruby (One Month Rails and some other tutorials), but I'm not sophisticated enough to know instinctively how to refactor towards "clean" or "elegant." Most of my code is pretty ugly, and gets uglier the longer I work on it, since when I'm hacking on something without guidance I spend a lot of time just trying not to break things. Is there a good resource for a non-programmer to start learning Clojure? The syntax is a bit scary to me, but I just think back to when I first learned about programming and figure diving in will eventually make it read more sensibly to me.

Also, being connected to a live REPL seems pretty valuable for learning.

[nonrecursive]

Clojure From the Ground Up http://aphyr.com/tags/Clojure-from-the-ground-up is a good resource, and there's also my own Clojure for the Brave and True http://www.braveclojure.com/ . I actually started by going through "Land of Lisp" first. Though it covers common lisp, not Clojure, it's a very fun book.

edit: Realm of Racket is also a good lisp book, and a lot of people like "the little schemer". It's hard for me to say how good these are for people completely new to programming, though.

Finally, there's the ClojureBridge curriculum, which is targeted at new programmers: https://github.com/ClojureBridge/curriculum

[the_watcher]

Thanks, I'll check them all out. I've been playing with languages for a few years now and built some really tiny, throwaway stuff. I'd say I grasp the basic concepts of programming pretty well (by basic I mean the very basic), but I still very much feel new to programming. I started with Ruby because it's accessible, but ever since I've learned about them, I've wanted to eventually learn a Lisp.