Clojurians Log v2

register cursive as non-commercial... IIRC, it'll need to be renewed every 6 months (instead of every year like the commercial/personal licenses). https://cursive-ide.com/licence-faq.html has an FAQ that might answer more questions for you

> should I learn lisp (or any easy variant/dielect) first? No need for that.

Go with Clojure. It is probably one of the most, if not the most, structured and designed to be used in particular way, Lisp. To me it just clicked immediately, when I first saw and it was years ago when I had almost zero programming experience, just some php/wordpress and rudimentary JavaScript. Every other Lisp seems to be more complicated, even if some are more „powerful”. And Clojure really does good job of avoiding redundant parenthesis. It might sound silly but for me it really makes reading and writing it more pleasant. So yeah, Clojure is the easy variant. I've heard good things about Cursive, but not used it, probably go with it

And you have ClojureScript so you can easily write server/client apps in one language which really is fun. I don't think any other lisp has such good story for that, even if some do compile to JavaScript

If you really want to stick with Intellij, there's also some open-source alternatives like https://github.com/clojure-lsp/clojure-lsp-intellij + https://github.com/afucher/clojure-repl-intellij from @ericdallo and @arthurfucher

There's also a #C0744GXCJ channel where you can ask more in-depth Qs about it.

Cursive is free for personal non-commercial work, otherwise it's paid. It's very good though. Alternatively you can use the combination of Clojure LSP and Clojure REPL.

And I support what others said, just learn Clojure right away

clojure is closer to scheme than any other major variant, scheme was designed to be an educational language, and plt scheme has an ide with high quality lessons built in. that said, clojure is fine as a first lisp, especially if you already know java.