(Note, I myself started with Lisp prior to Common Lisp by a few years, but I used it near its inception and have vaguely followed it since then (I soon switched to Scheme and now am playing with Clojure).)<p>"<i>Have I just hit a bad corner of the Lisp world?</i>"<p>Yes, you have; for the things you want to do you should try either a Scheme that has the libraries you need (I'm not sure if there are any (probably not, but maybe try one that e.g. already has IRC stuff?)) or Clojure, which by virtue of sitting on top of the JVM and having fast and clean interoperability handles the libraries problems.<p>Dependencies are handled by existing parts of the Java ecosystem and/or the relatively new Leiningen system (the name is a play on ant, the first Java build system).<p>Warning, in terms of functional programming, there's a continuum of CL &#60; Scheme &#60; Clojure.  Unlike the others, Clojure is not multi-paradigm, you <i>will</i> use it functionally (well, unless you use it as syntactic gloss for programming in Java, which misses much of the point).<p>Here's the most recent HN item on getting up to speed with Clojure: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086562" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086562</a><p>Note that getting SLIME up at this very moment might require a bit of trickery, a recent SLIME commit broke it for Clojure's use of it.  Be sure to check out the Clojure Google group and feel free to ask any sorts of questions on it if you get stuck (the community is a lot better than CL's).<p>(Historical notes: CL is bad for networking and concurrency because it was formalized before there were standards for those areas and it has been stuck in amber since then.  Various implimentations have non-standardized libraries for them (there may be something of a standard for threads, I forget, but in many CL implementations threading support itself is iffy at best).  And you already know the networking story (which CL are you trying?).<p>Scheme standardization is <i>very</i> slow; it is progressing, there are optional SRFI (Scheme Requests for Implementation) standards for each of the above (I think, not sure about networking), but I can't recommend it for what you're trying.  If you e.g. wanted to start from the bottom up by going through the SICP or another book, that would be fine, or if you wanted to research language stuff it's great, but it just doesn't yet have a general modern programming ecosystem and won't for some years if ever.  In general, you match your needs with the implementation and its packaged libraries and go from there.  If you want to try that route anyway, ask me for some pointers.)