@freemo Didn't even mention Haskell.. doing that too though :)

@akater then the next question WOD be SLY vs SLIME

@Absinthe SLY is a fork of SLIME meant to sacrifice compatibility and stability in the name of new features. I'm not very familiar with those features. Stickers look cool. Multiple REPLs may be useful to recover from a lost connection to Lisp (I got hit by it a couple of times).

So I tried SLY; but whenever I tried to autocomplete, it crashed Emacs, and I maybe even had to reboot, don't remember. I only remember those were severe crashes. My experience is likely unusual but I prefer a stable environment. SLIME is very reliable.

@akater I have them both running in different configurations, I am not noticing much in the way of differences, but I am so novice or neophyte ... Nematode even.. I really need a good feature walkthrough.

@Absinthe It's a long journey. :-) I've been using SLIME for years and only recently learned about some nice features. Just use it and ask questions about particular use cases (“How do I do this? Is that possible?”) in communities with competent members.

@akater still bouncing around different emacs setups.

@akater once I finish the mentored track on exercise.io I will look for a proper walk through tutorial.

@akater I got both CCL and sbcl running, and they both seem pretty much the same. Sbcl just released 2.2 but I don't know if it will matter much. Added stuff about blocks. I still like CLisp repl from the command line works nice without adding redline around it

@Absinthe Using a Lisp (any Lisp) without SLIME or something similar, like in a basic CLisp repl, is a fairly terrible experience. Emacs will watch your parens for you, complete symbols, jump to definitions in code and to entries in the spec. SLIME will let you inspect the state of your program (= the state of your Lisp process(es)).

Features of CLISP vs ClozureCL vs SBCL are likely not noticeable to a beginner.

@akater when I started off I was using Vim and just running the tests from the command line. So it kind of didn't matter what one I ran. But as I move over to Emacs I want to do it "the right" way. Just need to figure out what it is