I’m glad you had a better experience than I.

I tried learning CL back in 2006 and read a quickstart guide from the #lisp IRC channel. It had sentences in it like:

“ Using a plain text editor without any runtime connection to your Lisp implementation just because you think you prefer its keybindings is stupid and self-defeating.”

And

“Follow these directions or risk our wrath, or at least unsympathetic attitudes!”

The document, mercifully, doesn’t appear to exist any more. Maybe when I called them on it at the time they realized that maybe there’s a better way and changed it. But it definitely made a poor first impression.