As someone who tried to go from noob to SICP, I can attest to this.
I was really like looking forward to learning lisp after reading pg's essays, but when the time came to install the environment, I hit a brick wall.
Pg does mention a noob should get a tech-savvy friend to help him get started. Unfortunately, all the hackers I knew were in the Bay Area, but I was in South America.
Installing Lisp on a mac took me two months, working full time (between macports and other false starts, like trying to install linux). I still can't get slime on emacs; I have to run clisp in the terminal.
So, yeah, not exactly user friendly, or accessible to beginners.
If you visit #emacs or #lisp on freenode it's very likely someone can help you get Slime sorted out on your Mac. Many of the regulars there use such a setup (including myself).
Lispbox is great, but when coming from a different environment I found it extremely useful to customize emacs a little (nothing fancy, F2 for save, ctrl-C copy) and unfortunately you can't do that in lispbox.
To the GP, it takes a lot of time and effort, but what you learn stays with you. Can't remember how many times I installed everything afresh, and on how many machines, but now it's really easy and, though it could be confirmation bias, rather elegant. I'm pretty sure I could teach somebody up to my level in 3-4 weeks, including lisp itself.
That said, I'm still not done installing - today i tried http://dirtyhack.org/vetler/docs/cl-webapp-intro/part-1/
and got a "make-pset is an undefined function" for no apparent reason. <Sigh> I guess it's another Elephant reinstall in the next break. But it does get easier :) This autumn I hope I can move to actual programming.
SBCL, mzScheme, and Clisp. I got SBCL and Clisp to work.
I'm having trouble explaining why I had such a hard time, but I think that's because I was a noob at the outset, but I'm not such a noob any more. Sure, now I can install Lisp on a friends computer in a day, tops. For good hackers, installing lisp is trivial. Of course, there are lots of things that good hackers can do in a tiny fraction of the time it takes anyone else. But from a noob's perspective, everything is very different. There might be a place that works, but there are many that don't, and those dead ends are really going to set you back.
Maybe I can't see things through a noob's eyes any more, but for whatever reasons, installing lisp took me two months, working full time.
I confess that I had a struggle to get the Oracle bindings for CLISP working on Linux (3 days full-time work, and I am very experienced with build issues on that platform), and I still haven't been able to do it on Solaris. Getting Oracle bindings for Tcl or Python was trivial, literally minutes of effort, including the download. So yeah, LISP does have a long way to go. I can use it on (some of the) kit I control, but forget deploying LISP apps anywhere else in the organization, there's no way I want to be responsible for building and maintaining it on the plethora of platforms and versions we have.
I was really like looking forward to learning lisp after reading pg's essays, but when the time came to install the environment, I hit a brick wall.
Pg does mention a noob should get a tech-savvy friend to help him get started. Unfortunately, all the hackers I knew were in the Bay Area, but I was in South America.
Installing Lisp on a mac took me two months, working full time (between macports and other false starts, like trying to install linux). I still can't get slime on emacs; I have to run clisp in the terminal.
So, yeah, not exactly user friendly, or accessible to beginners.