Kim Hirokuni

> Should I start with Common Lisp, or some popular dialect (Clojure?)

Clojure is not a dialect of Common Lisp. That would be like saying that C#, Go, Kotlin or Scala are dialects of Java. They are both Lisps, but neither is a dialect of one another.

I use Clojure at work and recreationally, and I learned Lisps first from it, so I am a bit biased, but I do think Clojure is a good Lisp to learn in 2020. I'd say Racket is a close second.

So my rec would be to learn Clojure, and this is my curriculum of choice:

1. Read through: https://kimh.github.io/clojure-by-example/#about
2. Then read through: https://aphyr.com/posts/301-clojure-from-the-ground-up-welcome
3. Then read through: https://clojure.org/reference/reader
4. Now start referring to the Cheatsheet: https://clojure.org/api/cheatsheet and https://clojuredocs.org and https://cljdoc.org. Bookmark them.
5. Finally, read through guides here: https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started
6. Now go to: https://4clojure.org and go through the exercises, start with elementary and easy. Even better, get the Android app, so you can practice on the go, the bus, the bathroom. Also for some reason the order of exercise in the Android app is the best, so I'd try and follow that. You don't need to go through them all, you can probably stop after easy or medium.
7. Once that's done, get Clojure Cookbook and go through the recipes.
8. Oh and, always go to the Clojure slack beginner channel and don't hesitate to ask questions and for…

I really didn't enjoy the book when I read it in ~2014 I think. It's a pain to get set up with emacs and then it walks you through functional programs without introducing anything first. And it is indeed difficult to grok, especially because they are toy programs with zero real world value. In that sense, I'd compare it to Learn You A Haskell For Great Good, but with less context.

This[0] is a better way to learn, in my opinion.

Then after that, maybe check out Brian Will's videos[1].

Then definitely check out this helpful video on web dev[2]. There's a better video somewhere but I can't find it anymore. It's just a guy walking his friend through how to make an isomorphic clojure web app. Very nice pair programming walkthrough guide. But I guess it's forever gone.

[0]: https://kimh.github.io/clojure-by-example/

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAC43CFB134E85266

[2]: https://youtu.be/LcpbBth7FaQ

For Book, I would recommend: https://www.braveclojure.com/

Additionally, you can learn from this:
- http://clojure-doc.org/articles/tutorials/introduction.html
- http://app.klipse.tech/
- http://www.4clojure.com/
- https://kimh.github.io/clojure-by-example