1. choose your lisp dialect: do you want to learn CL, Scheme, Arc, ...?
2. randomly pick an implementation of your chosen lisp. It really makes no difference as a beginner. I speak from experience. You can always switch later in a painless way.
regarding CL, choose an open source implementation if you don't fear things like emacs. If you prefer a more polished IDE, choose a commercial implementation.
Comments
1. choose your lisp dialect: do you want to learn CL, Scheme, Arc, ...?
2. randomly pick an implementation of your chosen lisp. It really makes no difference as a beginner. I speak from experience. You can always switch later in a painless way.
regarding CL, choose an open source implementation if you don't fear things like emacs. If you prefer a more polished IDE, choose a commercial implementation.
CL on Lispbox is what I have now. Which means I use (use being a overstatement) e-Macs with a Lisp extension.
'emacs', please!
SBCL + slime + emacs on linux and you should be fine. Use clbuild to download packages.