I'm pretty excited by Clojure so thinking of delving more into that, and then hoping it maps back onto Elisp, despite it lacking stuff like tail recursion. Would that make sense, or should I stick closer to the tree?

Maybe CL is the best route to Elisp... If so, any recommendations on how one might learn CL in 2021?

I actually only know CL and Elisp. I played a bit with Clojure, and its Emacs story looks pretty solid, but I was thinking it might be difficult to translate idiomatic clojure code to Elisp when Clojure has more emphasis on purity.

I'd guess that CL is closest to Elisp, especially when you use the popular "cl-mode", and you have the same mental model of hacking on a live lisp system. I learned CL from Paul Graham's "ANSI Common Lisp" back in the day, but I'd too be interested in what's recommended in 2021.

Yup. The closest is Common Lisp. Clojure’s idioms don’t match very well with Elisp oftentimes.

The best way to learn CL, IMO, is installing Portacle[1] and working through either Practical Common Lisp[2] or Common Lisp: a Gentle Introduction[3]. (I personally prefer PCL, but a lot of people like Gentle)

[1]: https://portacle.github.io/

[2]: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

[3]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html

Thanks, yes started reading through PCL last night, as it's online, and it's already cleared so much up for me. I'd never really thought about learning CL first until this thread, but now it feels like I've found the missing piece. And PCL is pitched exactly right, for me.

clojure uses immutabilty heavily. It doesn't really match 1-to-1 CL/elisp code. I think PCL(http://gigamonkeys.com/book/) is still a great introduction to CL. The author is planning a 2nd edition last i heard.

I'm curious if you have a good sheet on what differences are worth focusing on?

My main blocker is that it was originally tough to realize that the buffer is an essential part of elisp. Reflexively, I would look for ways to manipulate strings and be disappointed at how hard that was to find. As soon as I started seeing elisp as a way to program buffers, things got a lot easier.