Which lisp for a (lisp) novice?

I'd like to learn lisp but I'm confused with the many variants I'm finding.

What would you recommend for an experienced programmer in other languages (mainly C and perl), wanting to learn lisp?

Should be a well documented lisp and working in Mac OS and main UNIXes (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, ...)

I've found and enjoyed the "Practical Common Lisp" book, mainly because it starts with realistic examples, not the car/cdr/lists I had found in the past that lead me to the wrong conclusion that lisp was "only" good at processing abstract lists and could do nothing useful.

A bit more reading in this ng seems to suggest that Common Lisp is not a good choice, so I'd like to have some more opinions before spending to much time learning the wrong stuff.

What do you think? Ideas and criticisms welcome.

--
Toni
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Better is better: improving productivity through programming
    ... Nothing in Common Lisp prevents us from doing that. ... some other popular languages takes a *lot* of work. ... The idea of using a language with better abstraction facility doesn't ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • How Common Lisp sucks
    ... blog entries on Lisp. ... To embed languages that differ from CL's semantics ... Lisp that sucks, it's Common Lisp that sucks." ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Joel hammers the final nail into Lisps coffin
    ... and/or combination of technologies, because _programming is hard_. ... are surely large and more usefule then most of the Common Lisp ... that's the central trade-off between singe- and multi-paradigm languages. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Program compression
    ... problems to be solved much more concisely than with Lisp. ... In Common Lisp, it's another one line of code: ... My point is that different languages are based on different things ... it would be impossible for the author of a macro (in the Lisp ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: Program compression
    ... In Common Lisp it's just one line of code: ... In OCaml with OCaml's notation: ... In Common Lisp, it's another one line of code: ... Consider parsing Mathematica expressions including lists, rules, sums, ...
    (comp.programming)