The OP could just try both and decide for himself.
Btw, fixed function is still used on some consoles so learning it would not be a waste. IMHO.
Some people who come here from other languages (and had made complete games) most likely have a working opengl framework they coded themselves and porting it to another language should be trivial at best(though) I must admit lwjgl does not always conform to the standard opengl prototypes)