Writing scripts using [0] Babashka is also really nice.
Now there are of course limitations to what you can do in terms of not supporting Java reflection or the full Clojure compiler. But I've made some nifty small scripts and convenience helpers with it. And the dev experience of making these scripts is so much nicer than trying to write bash scripts. The Clojure edn syntax is super simple, and the REPL connected editor let me rapidly test parts of the code just like with full Clojure apps.
I don't have experience with other lisps, but I can vouch for Clojure being very nice. The community was welcoming and friendly to newcomers when I started learning, I hope it still is. One thing I love about the Clojure ecosystem and community is the effort taken to never break libraries. I've looked at libraries I used some ten years ago, and the API is still compatible with code I wrote back then. There is very little churn. Maybe this is because the language is largely untyped and editors only partially check "types". Having breakages in libraries you consume once every couple of months would get really tiring in Clojure land. I'd imagine the same problems would present themselves in Common Lisp and others.
Codex can one shot the bindings flawlessly, and the interface is significantly faster for downcalls vs. JNI.
What's that supposed to mean? Many (probably most if we only consider the non-toy ones) lisp implementations are "native" (compiling to native machine code, not interpreted).
I've already got enough of JVM compatibility to run Ring apps, and have some fun libraries like a Reagent style library on top of GTK https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-07-02-jolt.html
I've used it a tiny bit at work (on Windows) and at home (on Linux), and ran into one issue with "out" parameters, but otherwise it works really well.
I had used C++ for several years to make shareware games, so I took a test to challenge some programming courses. I vaguely recall doing well, but my advisor encouraged me to take them anyway. I'm glad that I did, because I had little understanding of theory.
Funny story: the instructor never mentioned that we could use more than one line of code. So every single piece of homework that I handed in, and every test, was one giant line of nested logic. Which worked better than one might expect, and completely changed how I wrote code from that point forward. That's how I made the connection a decade later that functional programming is akin to a spreadsheet, as are higher-order method chains and immutable variables.
I think of Clojure as being a layer above Lisp, sort of like how Swift might be considered a layer above Objective-C/Smalltalk. However, bare Lisp has problems around not quite giving enough out of the box. It's minimalist enough that developers end up reinventing the wheel for things that should probably be provided by a layer/library similar to Scheme or Clojure.
To digress, I feel that mutable variables and even monads are a code smell in functional programming since they can cause impurity. They're more of a crutch to ease conversion of code from imperative languages. However, monads can be useful to simulate every path through a program, sort of like superposition in quantum mechanics and SAT solvers. So they aren't necessarily bad, just taught incorrectly, probably because they're so hard to grok.
I'd vote to settle on a series of layers like Common Lisp -> Scheme/Racket -> Clojure/Elisp, with the final layer providing the intersection of features available from the most widely-used Lisp variants. Note that this is specifically to form a bridge from imperative languages, so research work might need additional DSL features brought forth from the Racket layer.
Edit: I forgot to mention that Scheme is a good fit for genetic algorithms, see books by John Koza (no affiliation). My feeling is that we haven't seen anything yet regarding what problems AI can solve, since it's having to do it the "bare hands" way with LLMs and pattern matching.
If you want a Scheme with batteries included, I recommend GNU Guile. Also worth your time are Racket, Clojure, Janet.