Which functional language(s) does Clojure share the most in common with?

Question

I don't know much about functional programming but am interested in learning Clojure.

Are there any functional languages that would be a good point of reference to understand how functional programming works in Clojure?

Or is Clojure different enough in its functional programming approach that I would be better off to just focus on Clojure's functional features by themselves?

Answer 1

Clojure is a lisp so learning other lisps will help a lot in getting used to the parts of the "lisp culture" or general way of doing things. Remember that Clojure breaks significantly with Common Lisp though.

Clojure is lazy so learning Haskell will really help get you used to the idea of real lazy programming.

Clojure is concurrent so learning a little bit of Erlang will help though you will need to keep in mind that Erlang includes a lot about distributed programming while clojure is all about concurrent programming that is not necessarily distributed.