Scheme or Common Lisp?

Yes, it's a “which programming language to leran ???” thread, but this time it's ...more specific I guess?

So I already know C ^{_{and Perl}} and wish to acquaint myself with other paradigms than the procedural and object-oriented ones I've become uncomfortably familiar with (i.e., functional). I also intend to learn Haskell at some point in the future in order to complete the holy trinity of syntaxes.

So, /anus/. Regarding the thread title, what are the differences that you find make you prefer one Lisp dialect to another? Is there even much of a difference? Or did you just choose one as your way of saying, “I've read SICP”?

In my experience the lisp-1/2 argument is very weird. Usually people say something like, "If I want my function argument to be a list, I want to call it 'list.' But then I can't use list!" Which sounds mildly convincing, except I've never actually had a function which took a list as an argument, and needed to create a new list internally, which wasn't better expressed by something like map.

Does a lisp-2er have some kind of function they can give as an example where lisp-1 namespaces result in awkward code? It may just be that I'm so used to scheme I have a kind of blind spot here.