WRT Norvig if you learn clojure to learn functional and parallelism, you'll win, but if you learn clojure so you can write visual basic in clojure you'll lose. He's giving a necessary but not sufficient option for each broad field you need to understand.
WRT Hickey if you "gain advanced skills" by using the best language for the job, then the language mattered with respect to the learning process. But once you understand the "fun" of concurrency, the language you used is no longer relevant. You can talk ACID compliant transaction using clojure STM as a vehicle or your favorite SQL, the language just doesn't matter any more.
The point of a reading primer "see spot" "see spot run" isn't to learn about dogs, and once you can read, you don't need the primer anymore. There are learning techniques and textbooks that are better at learning than others... the the mastery, if it ever comes, came from sweat, not the book itself.
WRT Hickey if you "gain advanced skills" by using the best language for the job, then the language mattered with respect to the learning process. But once you understand the "fun" of concurrency, the language you used is no longer relevant. You can talk ACID compliant transaction using clojure STM as a vehicle or your favorite SQL, the language just doesn't matter any more.
The point of a reading primer "see spot" "see spot run" isn't to learn about dogs, and once you can read, you don't need the primer anymore. There are learning techniques and textbooks that are better at learning than others... the the mastery, if it ever comes, came from sweat, not the book itself.