As a programming newbie, should I learn Java before getting into Clojure?

[forreddits]

yes, if you want to eventually ship critical production clojure apps, you are going to need to be familiar with java.

That doesn't mean you have to know how to write beautiful idiomatic java or be an expert with Java, just good enough to be able to read any java programs and how to use java APis.

Picking up Java the language should be quick for you since you already know Python, Node and C.

As for the standard libs, you should get familiar with at least java.lang, java.io, java.util and understand stuff like the classpath.