One doesn't need to "wear a tie" to learn Clojure - syntax is so simple it can be explained on a napkin. You need to get:
1. An editor with structural editing features - google: "paredit vim/emacs/sublime/etc.", on VSCode - simply install Calva.
2. How to connect to the REPL. Calva has the quickstart guide or something like that.
3. How to eval commands in place. Don't type them directly into the REPL console! You can, but that's not how Lispers typically work. They examine the code as they navigate/edit it - in place. It feels like playing a game - very interactive.
That's all you need to know to begin with. VSCode's Calva is great to mess around it. Even if you don't use it (I don't), it's good for beginners.
Knowing Clojure comes super handy, even when you don't write any projects in it - it's one of the best tools to dissect some data - small and large. I don't even deal with json to inspect some curl results - I pipe them through borkdude/jet, then into babashka and in the REPL I can filter, group, sort, slice, dice, salt & pepper that shit, I can even throw some visualizations on top - it looks delicious; and it takes not even a minute to get there - if I type fast enough, I slash through it in seconds!
Honestly, Clojure feels to be the only no bullshit, no highfalutin, no hidden tricks language in my experience, and jeeeesus I've been through just a bit more than a few - starting with BASIC in my youth and Pascal and C in college; then Delphi, VB, then dotnet stuff - vb.net, c#, f#, java, ruby; all sorts of altjs shit - livescript, coffeescript, icedcoffeescript, gorillascript, fay, haste, ghcjs, typescript, haskell, python, lua, all sorts of Lisps; even some weird language where every operator was in Russian; damn, I've been trying to write some code for a good while. I'm stupid or something but even in years I just failed to find a perfect language to write perfect code - all of dem feel like they got made by some motherfluggin' annoyin' bilge-suckin' vexin' barnacle-brained galoots. Even my current pick of Clojure can be sometimes annoying, but it's the least irksome one... so far. I've been eyeing Rust and Zig, and they sound nice (but every one of dem motherfuckers look nice before you start fiddling with 'em) yet ten years from now, if I'm still kicking the caret, I will be feeding some data into a clj repl, I'm tellin' ya. That shit just fucking works and makes sense to me. I don't know how making it stop making sense, it just fucking does.
