Well, Clojure also was a mess when I tried it (2 years ago maybe?). Leiningen (a/the build system) was pretty slow, and I couldn't find a way to use the language in a more lisp-like way easily, like editing a few files and (re)loading them into a running REPL (other than iterating through all buffers in Emacs and loading/evaluating them manually; there may have been other problems as well, I don't remember). You know, like you can edit a few Java files in Eclipse, press shift-ctrl-s, and have the new code hot-deployed into your debugging session.
Maybe the people who wrote the Clojure tutorials considered that question to be SO natural they didn't even mention it, but I found it very unintuitive. And running a very slow tool on every code change and waiting for the build and then starting the program is very unnatural and un-lisp-like.
Common Lisp is a bit old by now, but it's always been very stable and fast. Maybe Racket is a more modern+mature Lisp family member that's nice to try.
I also tried getting into Clojure around that time. I was coming from CL where we have nice things like conditions and restarts, dynamic variables, and CLOS -- being able to hit an error in the debugger, inspect the slot of the instance of some object that caused the error and recompile the class definition to fix the error without restarting the program is really nice (all of the running instances are updated). I was not used to Clojure's unhelpful tracebacks.
I don't understand what age has to do with anything... CL is still a good language.
Maybe the people who wrote the Clojure tutorials considered that question to be SO natural they didn't even mention it, but I found it very unintuitive. And running a very slow tool on every code change and waiting for the build and then starting the program is very unnatural and un-lisp-like.
Common Lisp is a bit old by now, but it's always been very stable and fast. Maybe Racket is a more modern+mature Lisp family member that's nice to try.