Over at LispCast, eric’s got a new post up called No easy download. In it he talks about the difficulty of being new to Lisp, wanting to learn, and not knowing where to start.

He’s right. It’s way too hard – and I’d argue it’s one of the primary factors that hampers Lisp adoption. As one of his commenters points out

Perl, Python, and Ruby have the advantage that they are the only or at least canonical implementation of that particular language. Therefore, you go to perl.com or python.org and there it is.

When I run lisp, I don’t type ‘lisp.’ My implementation isn’t at lisp.org or anything like that because there are a bunch of implementations, none of them strictly canonical. If you’d gone to sbcl.org or cons.org (CMUCL) for instance, you would have found an accessible download link, although not really a mascot.

The comment is correct that there isn’t a canonical implementation of Lisp. But why should it matter? There can be a canonical place to go to for Lisp resources. There’s common-lisp.net, which isn’t bad, but as eric points out, it doesn’t lend itself to the “getting started” meme as well as python.org and ruby.org do. What about lisp.com? Well, it redirects to yeah.com, which has nothing to do with Lisp that I can tell. I can’t be sure though, because my employer blocks it:

Alright then, what about lisp.org?

Ok, it’s there and it’s Lisp-related, but it’s mostly about some group called the Association of Lisp Users. What about Lisp? Where can I download it?

I can learn about the history of this group, read about their board, their members, their meetings, and their sponsors. A little further down, I can read about past conferences. Further down, I can read about Lisp resources.

If the ruby.org page had been this way, there might not have ever been a Ruby on Rails, and there’d be no Basecamp or Twitter (ok, there would be, but they’d be made from PHP).

Now, to be fair, the ALU has a CL Gardeners project that is aimed specifically at dealing with this issue, and the ALU Wiki is actually pretty good – but the wiki should be the index of lisp.org, and that page should have a link to the alu.org homepage.

Of course, eric’s post spurred some discussion over at News.YC, in which I participated. Said radu_floricica:

Arguing between 3 or 4 clicks doesn’t change anything. There are a lot of problems with beginners and lisp, but they’re far from how to get to the first implementation. As a newbee myself, googling for lisp environments was damn easy and instructive: i knew within 20 minutes that I should use linux, and if i really wanted windows (as I did at first) there was only one choice. When I finally had access to a decent linux it took me maybe another 20 to confirm that sbcl is the one I wanted. All that gave me lots of background information on the side.

Now the first brush with asdf on the other hand was a nightmare. I still don’t understand why I have to become an expert in pgp (definitely not just a beginner) just to use asdf-install.

I think the main problem for beginners is the effort it takes to install a reasonable environment. I tried two versions for a web application server: ucw and weblocks. Weblocks meant installing more then 10 different packages and source code is pretty much standard documentation – but it’s ok because it’s understandable and officially beta anyways. UCW is the standard – after a year and a half I still couldn’t produce an installation running on a port different then 8080 (I use 8080 for tomcat for all my machines).

All this effort is way disproportionate to the effects. Installing emacs and slime is may not be a breeze, but once you discover that googling “emacs configuration” brings up a bonanza it’s worth it. (Also that .emacs in windows is _emacs… that’s half a day I’ll never have back). But so much effort just to get a server running… if you want to help beginners write a better ucw tutorial, don’t just rearrange the links on the frontpage of lisp sites.

And my response:

Arguing between 3 or 4 clicks doesn’t change anything.

You’re wrong. And besides, the argument isn’t between 3 or 4 clicks. It should be no more than 2, and preferably one.

There are a lot of problems with beginners and lisp, but
they’re far from how to get to the first implementation.
As a newbee myself, googling for lisp environments was
damn easy and instructive: i knew within 20 minutes that
I should use linux, and if i really wanted windows (as I
did at first) there was only one choice.

You’re still wrong. Not every newbie even knows what to google for, and even if they did, it shouldn’t take them 20 minutes of web searching to figure out what they should download. And even that didn’t lead you to the right place – there is more than one option for Windows (cusp, allegro, lispworks, and clisp for starters – that’s not even counting scheme stuff), Linux isn’t the only way, and SBCL isn’t the only thing going on Linux. But a newbie either

a) has no way to figure all that out in a reasonably short amount of time b) isn’t going to try

And beyond that, you’re still missing the point: he shouldn’t have to.

Once you’re concerned with learning emacs and slime and customizing your environment and installing weblocks and getting asdf and asdf-install to work, you’re already committed. Difficulty doesn’t matter nearly as much by that point. Being able to easily download and dick around in the REPL is the number one hurdle that keeps people from trying Lisp.

The rest of the post I agree with, and I don’t argue that there are hurdles beyond the first one that are bigger and harder to conquer, but that’s irrelevant if newbies aren’t willing to jump the first one.