Not sure about the process. The instruction says "You only need to load quicklisp.lisp once to install Quicklisp." But then goes on to speak about the process after the installation: "See Loading After Installation for how to load the installed Quicklisp into your Lisp session after the initial installation."
The instructions with curl are explicit instruction for download step. If you have it already in your ~/, you can bypass it and go directly to sbcl --load step
No. You only need to put the first three lines. Don't put ("quicklisp-slime-helper") there.
Also, this will merely allow you to run slime - not run slime for you.
Just press M-x and type slime, then press enter.
You'll get to Slime in no time.
if you're new to Emacs, consider going through tutorial first. After that, use Emacs to do text editing, etc. Soon enough you'll see that it boosts your productivity.
You may also want to read about adding Paredit, auto-complete, and maybe smartparens.
These are really useful.
As for development in Common Lisp, this might be interesting to you:
Emacs is text editor with great customization ability. You can do anything in Emacs.
You can write games that you play in Emacs, you can write scripts that will indent programs for you, you can use it as an operating system.
Mostly you just use it as a very good text editor.
.emacs is file where you customize your emacs - change default fonts, set color styles, add custom commands or shortcuts, load add-ons, etc.
So yes- emacs will work fine without .emacs file; however, after some time you'll want more from Emacs - and you will need your .emacs to achieve that.
After few months/years you'll end up with quite large .emacs, which will reflect your customized version of emacs. You'll probably want to back it up somewhere and make it easily accessible - using emacs without your customizations will feel stupid and redundant.
And if you need some help with Lisp, you may want to join IRC - freenode.net , and channel is called #lisp. There are many lisp folks who may help you. And if you want to ask on SE, don't use Unix&Linux, but rather StackOverflow or(if you want something about emacs) - Emacs Stack Exchange.
First recommendations: Practical Common Lisp and On Lisp are nice lisp books. I've heard nice things about Land of Lisp, but haven't read it myself.
Depends on what you mean by real software. I don't know of many commercial or popular programs written in Scheme, but it doesn't mean it's educational dialect. It's powerful language capable of many things.
It could as well replace Python(and I'd be glad if it happened), but it'd be as slow; both are interpreted.
M-x packages-list-package , find package you're interested in, get cursor on its name, press enter, select "install".
And then edit your .emacs to customize freshly installed package.
You'll need to get used to fact that in Emacs you hardly ever use mouse. In fact, it's not needed at all - keyboard is way faster and comfrotable.
comfortable*
As for real-time uses of scheme: it's core is really really small - this makes it perfect to embed it somewhere. That's what folks creating Final Fantasy movie did - they decided to strip Scheme from unnecessary things they didn't need, change it a bit, write interpreter for it and plug it into their project.
Depends on your intention. You need to read the output, not blindly follow the commands.
Retry will try running the command again. It might help if e.g. you run command that requires internet connection, but when you called there wasn't any.
Abort simply gives up on call. In most cases it's what you want - you misused some function, passed wrong argument, didn't pass argument, made a typo, etc.
