Any Lisp will do. I had mine with CL and now use Clojure. Racket is great. I’ve never used Janet, but it looks great, too. Pick one. But make sure you engage with the community and ask about editors and tooling. Don’t just fire up VSCode and start typing parentheses. If you do that, you’ll just be frustrated. And nobody who programs in Lisp does that. We use lots of plug-ins and have a live REPL right in our editors at all times. In other words, do what Lisp programmers do. If you try to “do Lisp” the same way you “do JavaScript” or whatever, you’re just going to get frustrated.

If I could explain the moment, I would. But I really can’t. That said, one aha moment for me was reading McCarthy’s original Lisp paper and realizing the whole core of the language was a single page (17).

https://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/agbkb/lehre/pi3/folien/...