It's because of his continual praise of lisp that I wanted to check it out.

What I'm complaining about is that it's much harder to "check it out" than it perhaps could be.

At one point many years ago, I wanted to check out this new Python thing. It was so easy, I've been hooked ever since.

> It's because of his continual praise of lisp that I wanted to check it out.

I can't argue with that. It did take me a long time to get comfortable with Lisp. But I felt it was worth the efforts.

> At one point many years ago, I wanted to check out this new Python thing. It was so easy, I've been hooked ever since.

IDLE is a underrated feature of Python. The default install includes a barebones IDE together with the REPL, making setup for beginners nearly zero effort. On the other hand, in lisp land, step 0 to learn most lisps is to learn emacs beforehand.

I use slimv with vim, but basic Emacs is not difficult: Ctrl-x b to swich betwen buffers, Ctrl-x s to save, Ctrl-x c to exit, Ctrl-c Ctrl-c to evaluate the CL buffer under Slime, Ctrl-x e to eval most Elisp and CL code functions.

Also, knowning CL makes learning Elisp a breeze, so you can customize your editor like nothing else.