There are actually a lot of ideas from Lisp in Java. But the Java people never admit that Lisp is one of the “parents” of Java, because it’s just not good public relations these days. Note that James Gosling actually wrote his own Lisp dialect once, for his Emacs-like text editor, long before Java happened. So he knows all about it. Saying “Lisp” just doesn’t sound good at this point in time.

The family tree is actually far less splintered than it used to be. In the early 1980′s, many divergent Lisp efforts came together to form the Common Lisp standard. The main competitor, Interlisp, is pretty much gone now. Of course, it’s quite easy to come up with your own Lisp dialect, and this has been done to great benefit by GNU Emacs, AutoCAD, and others (Interleaf, R.I.P.). But those are for very specfic purposes. There’s also Scheme, which has a rather different orientation, and doesn’t call itself “Lisp” anyway. So what’s left for general-purpose Lisp programming is Common Lisp. There are currently eleven maintained implementations of it, and as far as the language goes, they’re quite compatible. (The catch is that the language does not go as far as you’d like; more modern “standardized” libraries are needed.)

So it’s not really a family of languages. If you want Common Lisp, you do have a choice of implementations. I have written a survey of them, which should help you choose. SBCL is a fine choice (if you don’t need to run on Windows); the other free one that I like and know is Clozure. Either is fine. They’re very easy to download and install. Then read “Practical Common Lisp”, or any of the other good books linked to by the LispSurvey.

Regarding “I’m learning Linux, emacs, SBCL, Slime and Common Lisp at the same time.” Well, if you want to use Ruby, you’ll still have to learn Linux, and learn something to edit code such as Emacs. If you want an IDE, you’ll have to learn something like Slime (yes, maybe something easier to learn; check out “Cusp” as mentioned in the comments to your post), or in either language you can do without an IDE. And there isn’t ALL that much to learn about SBCL other than learning Common Lisp itself. And with any language, you have to learn ground rules like how to organize the code into files and what to put into your init file; that’s hardly unique to Common Lisp. So I don’t think you’re being quite fair in your comparison.

Indeed, the good resources need to be vetted and organized. There are people thinking about doing this; it’s a matter of pulling together the person-power, mostly.

Replying to some of the comments to your post:

Nobody has to worry about Lisp-1 vs. Lisp-2, other than to decide whether to use Common Lisp or Scheme. Why blame Common Lisp for the fact that Scheme exists and you “have to” choose between them? There are load of languages to choose from. Common Lisp and Scheme are just another two.

There really was a “golden age of Lisp” when Common Lisp was the only practical language around that had garbage collection! Most of you are probably too young to remember what the programming language scene was like about ten years ago: bleak, as the original post pointed out.

To see that I am not a raving Lisp bigot (as I sort of was in my youth, say thirty years ago), read this blog posting.

Lisp certainly has real drawbacks. Ten or fiftenn years ago, it truly looked like we would not be seeing interesting new languages any more (just as we are not seeing much innovation in operating systems right now). But the pendulum swings, and now there is a new golden age of computer languages happening. One that caught my eye recently is Scala.

Usually periods of creative birth and diversity are followed by periods of consolidation, where a few of the new entities become the popular ones. We’re in the creative outburst phase now. It’s fun watching all this happen.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/schemeway