> Overall, I think Clojure does a good job of being both practical and lispy. It's a language that is for building real things.
As opposed to? Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp are both highly practical. Scheme you might call more academic, but that's not really what people think of when they say "Lisp".
CL is not really highly practical. The stdlib is not very coherent and lackluster in general (do I really need to import external code to split a string?), the commonly accepted package manager is in an eternal beta limbo, the whole QL/ASDF/... thing is clumsy, parallel/concurrent libraries are very low-level, etc.
Now SBCL in itself is rock-solid and a fantastic experience when used with emacs, but the CL ecosystem is insufficient to qualify as “highly practical”.
IMHO, the most practical lispy language is Racket: tight language, excellent stdlib, easy to package and deploy, and a development experience that worse than CL but good enough.
The commercial Common Lisp I use, also has large amounts of extensions to CL. Including a function to split sequences/strings, parallel and concurrent extensions, ... ;-) It's actually the same commercial Common Lisp which Rich Hickey used years ago to write his first Lisp programs and where he developed his first ideas for Clojure.
I wasn't trying to set up an "opposition" on the language level in my sentence. The decision was couched in my personal constraints - whether "as a hobbyist" it was practical for me to learn the language successfully. And, having done so would it have the capabilities so I can build things that I'm interested in. For me personally, I like to have plenty of 'similar code' so that I can see what other people do. I was comparing this with a more academic approach which I've seen many Lisp learners enjoy - for example going through the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). Other languages I looked at and seemed interesting were Elm and Racket - no particular reason why they didn't stick.
I suspect a lot of the dynamics of my choice are because I wasn't coming from any sort of Lisp background previously. If you were coming from Common Lisp then things would feel different.
As opposed to? Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp are both highly practical. Scheme you might call more academic, but that's not really what people think of when they say "Lisp".