I'm a Common Lisp (CL) zealot and use it through Emacs but I have always disagreed with the suggestion a lot of experienced Lispers make to newbies that to get

I'm a Common Lisp (CL) zealot and use it through Emacs but I have always disagreed with the suggestion a lot of experienced Lispers make to newbies that to get started with CL you should use a commercial IDE, Emacs+Slime or at least some kind of Slime clone for Vim. I understand their reasoning but it is simply too big an obstacle if you just want to check a CL out. I do suggest picking a CL implementation with Readline support on the REPL and that usually means CLISP (http://www.clisp.org/ http://www.clisp.org/) since it offers just that on the most platforms without a hassle. Then you can just edit "whatever.lisp" in your favourite editor and go through the command history for reloading, evalling, etc. You can even skip the Readline support and pick other implementations and just start your script from the commandline. Just check the commandline options and CLISP even has #!/usr/bin/clisp (hashbang?) support. So you can do a hello world in an IDE independent fashion. Hope that helps, mail me otherwise :-)