> What advantage would I gain learning Commons Lisp over Clojure? You'd get to learn a standardized language with good support on many platforms (including the

> What advantage would I gain learning Commons Lisp over Clojure? You'd get to learn a standardized language with good support on many platforms (including the JVM, see ABCL) that has stood the test of time very well. I'd argue you'd get a bigger picture of the Lisp world than Clojure can offer, which is rather a specialized offshoot that breaks with many traditions. Common Lisp is also a rather nonopinionated, it supports almost all programming styles out of the box, and new paradigms can be implemented on top gracefully. It doesn't push you into one way of doing a certain thing, unlike Clojure which has some strong preferences. Clojure will bring you an opinionated concept of parallelism/concurrency, and a standard library geared very specifically to its conceptual design. Some problems will already be solved for you, but in turn you miss out on many Lisp-ism that didn't make it into Clojure. I'd imagine Common Lisp is fairly well respected, too. :) I have always considered it the mother of all programming languages since 1990. From my experience (1 year ago) CL tooling is much better established than Clojure tooling. CL has tons of libraries available through Quicklisp. The quality of libraries is generally very high, but I can not really compare it to the Clojure landscape.