> Meanwhile, I have zero experience with CL but I keep hearing that it's highly mature, rock solid, the choice of most professional Lispers, and the platform of choice for Peter Norvig's book on AI programming.
It is definitely highly mature, rock solid and the choice of most professional Lispers. It anticipates many problems one doesn't even know one will have, and solves them.
In the negative column, it's a bit crufty for historical reasons (e.g. (aref ARRAY 1 2) vice (gethash KEY HASH-TABLE)) and made some choices which in retrospect were foolish (upcasing symbols being a huge one). The former doesn't really matter, and the latter can be solved with a simple (setf print-case :downcase).
For a long time, there were few good resources for learning Lisp. Fortunately, that's changed. Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/) is a must-read: it explains a little of why Lisp is so relevant for modern development. Edi Weitz's new book Common Lisp Recipes (http://weitz.de/cl-recipes/) is worth its weight in gold.
It is definitely highly mature, rock solid and the choice of most professional Lispers. It anticipates many problems one doesn't even know one will have, and solves them.
In the negative column, it's a bit crufty for historical reasons (e.g. (aref ARRAY 1 2) vice (gethash KEY HASH-TABLE)) and made some choices which in retrospect were foolish (upcasing symbols being a huge one). The former doesn't really matter, and the latter can be solved with a simple (setf print-case :downcase).
For a long time, there were few good resources for learning Lisp. Fortunately, that's changed. Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/) is a must-read: it explains a little of why Lisp is so relevant for modern development. Edi Weitz's new book Common Lisp Recipes (http://weitz.de/cl-recipes/) is worth its weight in gold.
Quicklisp (https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/) is a great place to find a lot of great packages.