I think it may even be easier if you're just starting. If you get used to Ruby, it could be painful/hard to switch after. It all depends how much you're ready to learn and if you need hand-holding, in the later case Ruby might be a better place to start. However, beware tutorials catered to new programmers, they're not always giving good advises (being generally written by newbies) and coding on your own is always more efficient. Furthermore, if you're not shy, participating in the community is the best way to learn, so it also depends on how you get along with the others using the programming language you've chosen.<p>My path to Lisp: C/asm &#62; Java&#62; Ruby (and some Scheme) &#62; C# &#62; Clojure<p>I've always been a polyglot and been programming for fun in lots of strange languages, so I've skipped lots of them in the above. Others notable languages I like are Python, OCaml and Haskell, but I didn't do much with them. That route may not be the best for you though. And you can't know which way will work for you until you've found it! So you need to try one and go far enough to see if you really like it.