There is a simple and elegant answer to this question: Just learn Common Lisp well first. New languages are exciting to people who know mostly new languages, so learn an old language before you learn new ones and get out of the maelstrom that will drown you in ever new languages that add nothing at all except some miniscule additional feature from another language that someone needed to make a whole new language to implement because he did not know (Common) Lisp to begin with. A "new" language that differs from the rest of the crop by one or a couple features is proof positive that both what it came from and what it has become are mutations about to die. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of such "languages" that people have invented over the years, for all sorts of weird purposes where they just could not use whatever language they were already using, could not extend it, and could not fathom how to modify its tools without making a whole new language. They never stopped to think about how horribly wasteful this is, they just went on to create yet another language called Dodo, the Titanic, Edsel, Kyoto-agreement...
