by duncan » Tue Jul 21, 2009 3:38 am
If you want to have a full-featured CL environment right off the bat I would highly recommend one of two setups. Either use SBCL on some variant of Debian Linux (Ubuntu is probably the most user-friendly) or use Lispworks Personal Edition with Edi Weitz's starter pack. There's nothing actually wrong with other setups (I use ECL more than any other CL these days), but you might have some difficulties with them, particularly if you want to use a lot of libraries.
This isn't comp.lang.lisp, so I won't be gratuitously mean to you. But I will argue that your set of conditions is silly. It's like going on a culinary tour of Japan and refusing to eat fish, noodles, soy sauce, or dashi. If you come home from such a tour with the impression that Japanese food is unappealing you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
Emacs is sort of old and crufty. Slime combined with a CL implementation is still a long way ahead of most development environments, despite the emacs cruftiness. IOf you insist on your preconceptions you will fail to understand why that's true, and if you fail to understand that you will miss most of what's good about CL. If pressed as to why I persist in programming in this now obscure language I would have to say: Ruby lacks a decent REPL. Ruby lacks a lot of other things CL has, but above all.. while Ruby has irb, you can't use irb in the same way you can use the CL REPL, because no one has bothered to make tools that would allow you to. If you choose to develop as you always have- write, compile, run, or some variation of that, you will miss the point entirely.
You say that you're interested in Lisp, and in CL in particular. If you want to know what is peculiar to Lisp you will have to use the tools that Lispers use. The interactive nature of the REPL is not insignificant.