I'm using Clojure for small personal projects, and a few toy applications at the office. ("The office" operates an IBM mainframe under z/OS -- sometimes this "

I'm using Clojure for small personal projects, and a few toy applications at the office. ("The office" operates an IBM mainframe under z/OS -- sometimes this "write once run anywhere" stuff really works.) Before my infatuation with Clojure I spent a couple of years intermittently hacking at SBCL, writing other toy applications, flirting with CLSQL and UCW and struggling with the ASDF ecosystem. CL became a disappointment because of the library problem, and because I couldn't shake the feeling that the language was overburdened. How many operators for equal do you need, anyway? (Joke, joke. Well, sorta.) Frightfully smart people, worthy of your respect, say you should know Lisp. You've already surmised that there's some groupthink here on HN. PG is one of Lisp's principal cheerleaders, he writes in lucid prose and has a couple of very nice textbooks to his credit. (On Lisp is probably the best macro treatment out there.) HN is itself written in PG's own Lisp variant, and there's lots of us here who have drunk the Kool-Aid. So do invest some time in Lisp, but don't believe for a moment that you can do a few Euler problems and have a good feeling for the language. Your effort will take some time, however long it takes to learn to recognize design patterns in Lisp code. (This is where those autoindenting editors shine.) And which Lisp? You'll get as many opinions as there are Lisps. Clojure's emphasis on FP attracts me, and its heavy emphasis on Java interop is immensely practical. You've got eight months to go before the next Conj; better get cracking, and good luck.