I'm part of the (lisp) crowd, I always had trouble and anger toward C, Java, (and even ADA for syntactic choices) and when I got into lisps it felt like finding

I'm part of the (lisp) crowd, I always had trouble and anger toward C, Java, (and even ADA for syntactic choices) and when I got into lisps it felt like finding home. There's less of what I don't like (side effects, syntax) and more of what I like (value oriented, composability, principled, interactive, tree/recursive thinking, ability to customize your language more). A 'cleaner' starting point might be clojure (lisp on top of the JVM). Rich Hickey tried to make it short and principled, leveraging interfaces for polymorphism. schemes are cool too. Some cruft in lisp I still like, like car/cdr .. in clojure they're named first/rest .. obviously more obvious.. yet a I miss using car and cdr to walk/deconstruct structures. There's something timeless about them.