Getting Started With Common Lisp about lispmethods HOT 3 OPEN

Really good tutorial

from lispmethods.

Great kickstart for CL—with emphasis on "kick"!

from lispmethods.

Sorry to say Portacle is effectively dead and unmaintained. Probably not a good idea to recommend it. It also reinforces the notion that one can only edit lisp with emacs.

Since you seem to want to make common lisp seem easy while acknowledging that it is not, you could suggest just skipping emacs (immensely off-putting and unnatural unless one is already conversant with it) and using any editor under the sun that has a paste to terminal command. Then, rlwrap sbcl and call it a day. Most of the advantages of "interactive development" will be there. You'll only lose inline evaluation in the editor and a debugger (hardly a beginner thing and not even essential for advanced developers--Ken Thompson famously used print statements as the debugger), which aren't essential.

By not having to install the brittle sly, slime, slynk, swank variants, you make start-up much, much easier. As you say--you are not trying to be overtly opinionated, just practical. And users will get approximately 93% (scientifically determined :-)) of the benefit. Later, real enthusiasts can add all of the bells and whistles and whirligigs.

from lispmethods.