Which Lisp is the most practical and easy to pick up for a programmer? I already tried emacs lisp but the experience of running emacs was not great, so I gave up
I tried to get started with Clojure but their set up page is so confusing? The Windows version is still in beta? And intellij does not have a template for it like for Scala and Jetbrains even supports F#. I thought it was a mature language
Common Lisp was created and used by the DARPA and its community of public research labs and private companies to support all kinds of industrial and scientific projects, I don't think there is more practical Lisp. It's fast both in compile time and runtime, supports any programming paradigm you want, and it's one of the most interactive programming environments ever. There are multiple open-source implementations, and there are at least two commercial implementations with paid support.
If you want to start, install the new IDE for Common Lisp called Lem [0] and follow the free online book Practical Common Lisp [1]. If you have any questions, the community can help you on Discord with the language itself [2] and the IDE [3].
Emacs lisp is one of the worst lisps for most things, though it's a decent fit for its specific purpose.
People are suggesting clojure and clojure is great but it also has rigorous immutability semantics. If you're not familiar with that model you'll spend as much effort learning it as learning lisp, and it'll be unclear which things come from lisp weirdness and which from immutable weirdness.
Someone will also probably suggest racket, which has its strengths as a learning language but is also very large and complex, with numerous extensions to the core language that make it kind of a disorienting ecosystem.
I like janet a lot. It uses "normal" data structures as its primitives rather than the traditional cons cells. So if you want to understand and be connected to historical lisp it will feel very different, and be a poor choice. This also applies to clojure though now that I think of it. otoh if you just want to use parens & prefix notation and play with macros either will work.
What is practical depends on your goals. Clojure can do pretty much everything, though it's a bit less practical for things like high-FPS video games and desktop GUI.
My favourite right now is Chicken Scheme. Just the R7RS specification in general; the language is very minimal, yet has basically all you need. And Chicken has awesome C interop and a great little community on IRC in #chicken.
