I can relate to being frustrated with the lack of "real" io-examples when learning lisp, while at the same time seeing the benefits of functional programming, macros etc.

With something like clojure, you at least have a pretty clear deployment story (make a jar, drop jar in a container) -- but it's still not clear how you would best go about writing something like berklydb in clojure - never mind in SBCL (come to think of it, even implementing a couple of text handling utilities like grep or cat is pretty hard to wrap your mind around when working with "old school" lisps).

All that said, I'm pretty excited about racket, and somewhat hopeful that I'll eventually get around to doing some "real" functional programming in the not too distant future.

I don't yet "get" functional programming, but the reason I am reading this thread is that for years I have read about Lisp being a good thing (a language I have always intended to learn when I get the time). I think there was some (famous?) essay that talked about an enlightenment when you finally "get it" as a language.

Clojure seems to be a modern Lisp implementation. Runs on the JVM, has lots of libraries available.

How else will you "get it" without learning a functional language?

That's why I want to learn Clojure without "getting functional programming" yet.