After reading this thought provoking post on Common Lisp, it really does drive home that I should learn Common Lisp when I have some copious spare time :-b. Unfortunately, it seems that the quickest way to learn is to watch and interact with a Lisp master. They always seem to have these special tricked out environments for Lisp hacking.
On the other hand, you have to learn to love and appreciate the general condescension that the Lisp masters have. So learning it on your own is good. And the truly ancient Lisp masters have no grasp of “new” Common Lisp features like series (which don’t work anyway), conditions, and, really, the whole CLOS.
Anyway, the tricked out environment they’re going to tell you to use is just Emacs + SLIME. If you have a Mac, you can go get Aquamacs which is pretty nice, and then SLIME is pretty easy to set up, as far as that goes. I can walk you through that sometime if you’re interested. I’m no Lisp master but I can help you get on the road.
It doesn’t take very long to achieve the Lisp revelations. Living with it once you do is pretty hard. Especially combined with the Haskell revelations and the Ruby revelations.