I came to Scheme from C and Java and have looked briefly at Clojure. Clojure is a great effort and makes interfacing with Java simple but unless you are forced

I came to Scheme from C and Java and have looked briefly at Clojure. Clojure is a great effort and makes interfacing with Java simple but unless you are forced to use the JVM, I would recommend a regular Scheme instead. Clojure doesn't support continuations and tail call optimisation which are key features of Scheme and contribute significantly to its brilliance. Gambit is a very practical implementation that is fast and offers relatively easy interfacing to C. But, most serious effort in functional programming is done in Haskell or OCaml so thats where the libraries and jobs are. Of the two, I think Haskell is probably bigger and is the better language with more features. My recommendation would be to learn Scheme until you understand the basics, continuations and macros and then move on to Haskell which will be a lot easier having come from Scheme.