<i>I'd appreciate hearing from other people who came in, were similarly disgusted, but have come to understand the whole thing better.</i><p>Ok. The larger CL world is terribly fragmented. There's a smaller world inside the larger world which is really good. The trick for the beginner is distinguishing between the two, i.e. between what is detritus to be ignored ("massive twisty world of broken dependencies and half-finished libraries" describes that perfectly) and what is the real stuff (e.g. Edi Weitz's libraries like flexi-streams). Once you find your way to the smaller world, the fragmentation and dependency issues don't go away, but they become minor and occasional relative to the mind-blowing amazingness of what CL is good for.<p>How do you find your way to the real stuff? Trial-and-error and asking questions. Is that an acceptable answer? No; many people unfortunately never get over the confused/disgusted stage and bail. Does it work? Yes, very well, <i>if and when</i> you get over those initial hurdles.<p>I fully agree that the above situation is upsetting when you compare it to things that just work out of the box. There's so much half-baked and half-working stuff in the CL world that I can only compare it to spam. A lot of Lispers are unhappy about this, and many attempts have been made to fix it, but it isn't quite clear what a definitive fix would require.<p>My personal hope is that the work being done by the Clozure-with-a-Z people (CCL) will blossom into a well-functioning, self-sufficient, obvious place for people to begin with Common Lisp. They do seem to be getting there. Importantly, they have the nucleus of something that CL has been lacking for a long time (since, I suppose, the implosion of comp.lang.lisp into various forms of nastiness): a nice, normal community.