I'm not the first to gripe about this, but one more voice in the chorus never hurts: it is an absolutely insane state of affairs that the conventional environment for something as nice and relatively ageless as Common Lisp is something as hoary and archaic as Emacs. Forcing somebody to get used to the arcane and arbitrary keybindings in Emacs before they can enjoy Lisp is like making them learn to type with their toes in order to use a laptop. It's utterly senseless, and I'm pretty sure the only reason it is this way is that once you've invested the months it takes to feel at home in Emacs, you have no incentive to create a more natural environment.
I'm currently playing around with Sublime Text with the SublimeREPL add-on, modded out to run CLISP. As an environment it's cloying in its own way -- no, ST, I don't actually want you to insert that close-paren or quote mark for me, thanks anyway you interfering smartarse -- but the fact that I don't have to get a repetitive stress injury in my pinky or remember entirely un-mnemonic commands is a major plus. Lack of a simple, standardized, intuitive environment that just works (like Racket has) makes CL substantially less 'approachable' -- Emacs-hate was precisely the reason I didn't bother diving deep into CL years ago, and if a more accessable environment had existed back then I might be a CL guru by now.
Sadly, this is indicative of the mindset of the CL community, which has a very 'eat your fucking vegetables' attitude -- not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly an impediment to widespread Lisp dominance. You can have your elitism and complain about how brain-dead the rest of the world is, or you can work to enlighten the commoners and fill the world with beautiful things -- pick one.
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