David Bremner@cwebber BTW, for people reading this, looking for a less-toxic-than-average venue for getting CL help, #clschool on libera.chat has given me an improved impression on the CL community. I think having "helping newbs" as a defined mission keeps even people who would otherwise be a pain-in-the-ass somewhat in line and helpful.
Gnuxie 💜🐝@riley I would also like to add that the CL community is relatively small, but it does have passion and is very much alive. We have even had increased activity with the introduction of online meetings where we showcase projects. The community is mostly focused around #lisp #lispcafe #clschool on freenode (they're also accessible via the matrix bridge). The online meetings can be found here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCymtXMj1M7cKiV9TKLoTtEg/videos
Most beginners are pointed towards http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ but it is also worth just diving in and asking questions while referencing this to find out how to do '''trivial''' (for lack of a better word) things.
The editor I recommend using is https://portacle.github.io/ to begin with, however this comes with a structural editing mode called Paredit, which can be very confusing to a beginner, basically you manipulate the lists with the keyboard rather than deleting and unbalancing parens. There is a cheat sheet here https://github.com/georgek/paredit-cheatsheet/blob/master/paredit-cheatsheet-refcard.pdf
If that is too much you it can be disabled and you could use alternative editors (Vim, Atom and Sublime now all have extensions supporting interaction but I do not recommend them, I would strongly recommend attempting to use Emacs (Portacle) + Paredit first)
cage