[Gardeners] Ping!

[root]

Contact "Heow Eide-Goodman" <heow at alphageeksinc.com> who is the person
responsible for the LispNYC Users Group. This is a very active group
(they have been selected to participate in the google summer of code
three years running).

As to "the canonical choice"... well, that's common lisp. Its not 
really much about the implementations, although they all have their
own feature set. However, each one conforms quite well to the ANSI
standards. Any of the implementations will do.

You've been conditioned to expect a circus, I think. Java, Ruby,
Rails, Python... all the latest, greatest,... noise. Lisp is a much
more contemplative environment but one that has everything I find I
need.  I've been using Lisp on the job but have recently needed to
learn Python, which has been called "Lisp without parens" (but I'd have
to characterize it more as "BASIC with classes"). Every year there is a
new, great language introduced and they all fade. Lisp doesn't.

As for a useful IDE... Emacs. Seriously, there is no possible way
I know of to improve on Emacs as a Lisp IDE. I've been using it to
write Lisp code for 20 years. 

Tim