I would like all of those things, but I'm always turned off of CL for a few reasons - Emacs is hard to learn, and just doesn't have a lot of the things that ID

I would like all of those things, but I'm always turned off of CL for a few reasons - Emacs is hard to learn, and just doesn't have a lot of the things that IDEs have these days. Yes, I know it's a tired argument but it's a real one. The VSCode solution works fairly well but isn't as interactive, which is kind of the whole point of using CL. - There's a lot of weird quirks and badly named things in CommonLisp. You can definitely feel how old it is, but it's great that old libraries will still work. - The ecosystem is hard to navigate. I have bought a few CL books and some of them really suck because they reference libraries that flat out don't exist anymore (these are books in the last 10 years, which most CL books are). You will, of course, never find an API wrapper for anything new. Those things may not be hard to work on, but it's extra work. It's hard to move from Clojure, which has a strong (and well documented) ecosystem, a dead simple library, and good IDE support. It may not have the debugging support CL has, but between the REPL and immutable nature, it's not a huge loss. It's more debuggable than most languages. I would also say some Clojure libraries really stand out to me from EVERY ecosystem. Electric Clojure is really cool. Tempel is a very simple encryption library but you can do so much with it. Hiccup feels so natural. It doesn't get talked about a lot, but I feel bummed using other languages because they don't have such creative libraries.