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.