Common Lisp has pretty good support regarding books, libraries and developer mindshare in the Lisp community (which generally is quite fractured, albeit not on a Forth level). They can be pretty harsh at times, though.
Personally, I'd recommend going with some simple examples. Getting to grips with the language, the environment (probably Emacs+Slime) and a somewhat novel web framework at once can be pretty daunting. So taking baby steps on the result level, i.e. making stuff that could've been done with CGIs, won't heap yet another helping of novelties on your plate.
[1]: http://weitz.de/hunchentoot/
For CL, Scheme, Arc, ..., I have no idea.
The hardest parts were learning enlive and moustache. Enlive is incredibly powerful and very clever, but can be a bit overwhelming for clojure noobs. You definitely want to check out David Nolen's tutorial[5] for it. Aside from that, #clojure and the ring google group are full of wisdom.
Deployment wise, I build the site with a basic leiningen[6] uberjar and run it from an ssh, background it and disown it. yeah, thats terrible, but im lazy and nobody visits my site anyhow ;) Caveat here: Clojure 1.2 has a small bug with interned keywords[7] that will knock my site over in a couple of days if i forget to start it up with the default JVM profile. the -server profile fixes the trigger issues
Aside from that, I have an nginx gateway server that handles serving my media, nowww redirection and proxies all dynamic requests through to the jvm. the site itself hosts a jetty HTTP server via ring to handle all the requests.
The 'hardest' part of getting started with clojure vs say Python+Django or Ruby+Rails is that there is a lack of 'get you going' magic / tools like scaffolds or djangos admin. Once you get past that though, it is a very enjoyable platform inspite of the API changes.
[1]: http://brehaut.net
[2]: http://github.com/cgrand/moustache
[3]: http://github.com/cgrand/enlive
[4]: http://github.com/ashafa/clutch
[5]: http://github.com/swannodette/enlive-tutorial/
[6]: http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen
[7]: http://www.assembla.com/spaces/clojure/tickets/444?comment=9...
Ack! GNU screen will change your life.
Another clojure web framework - Conjure - has rails like migrations.
What do you do ?
http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/help/arc.arc is from Anarki, a community-maintained branch of "vanilla" Arc. They wrote such a help function, but there are also other extensions and differences that are reflected in said help.
If you're new to Lisp, http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt isn't a bad start. But there are countless Lisp tutorials out there.
As for online documentation: http://files.arcfn.com/doc/ + http://www.arcfn.com/2009/06/whats-new-in-arc3.html; see also http://arclanguage.org/item?id=12228, wherein I technically have another suggestion for learning Arc without the web ;).
[ Haven't dug in very far yet but Arc tutorial appears to be web development oriented, and you could look at the HN source code ]
I was startled to find that "C lisp"--that is, the lisp interpeter written in C, which you get when doing sudo aptitude install clisp on the latest Ubuntu distribution--is actually not the "standard" lisp interpreter. I still have no idea which is, if any.
Still, it seemed like a few of the web frameworks out there should have worked anyway, so I tried to soldier on for a while. Unfortunately, it was in vain: my dependency-fu simply wasn't strong enough. I also couldn't find a lisp equivalent to rack and wsgi, which is something of a non-starter imho.
I'm sure I am making some foolish assumptions, facilitated by the vast chasm that represents my experience with lisp and its ilk. I also have only managed to devote a few hours to it so far, so please, no one take this post as gospel--I'm just sharing what little I have found in case someone else finds it useful.
Clisp is one implementation of the Common Lisp language. Other Common Lisp implementations include SBCL and AllegroCL. Since no one party controls the Common Lisp language, none is standard.
Scheme is another Lisp language. It also isn't controlled by anyone, so it's just a sea of implementations. BUT — the closely related Racket language is centrally controlled and does have a standard implementation. In fact, that's pretty much the whole reason Racket diverged from Scheme — so that it could be the standard Racket instead of Scheme with a bunch of modifications.
The other popular Lisp these days is Clojure. Like Racket, it does have a central "creator," Rich Hickey, whose implementation is considered official.
At least there are more blogs about Clojure; and Racket is mature and well supported. (I also think Clojure code looks better than all the other lisps. Don't know why, yet.)
I've shied away from Scheme-based servers[3] hosted behind e.g. forward-proxies, because it seems to violate Occam's razor; but that's a personal bias.
[1]: http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/fastcgi
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation#Continuations_in_W...
You can use RESTAS framework http://restas.lisper.ru/en/
Example:
http://restas.lisper.ru/en/tutorial/hello-world.html
It's extremely well documented too.
I don't like web frameworks, here's what I currently recommend: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1778708
The RESTAS documentation just got translated from Russian, I'm actually supposed to proofread it this weekend.
Concur 100%; hunchentoot + postmodern. No continuation crap there.
Bliss could come from a combination of the two, however.
But your first sentence says it all - depends on what you're looking for. If you're outside of the cloud (by choice or necessity) Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, or even Groovy/Grails are all tough to beat.
