To use emacs, slime and sbcl on native Windows, the emacs/slime/sbcl was the recommend way to learn lisp. I choose MSYS2 for the gnu tools to do the compilation.
A decade ago I did most of my programming in pharo which is a Smalltalk. While coding in Smalltalk is impressive there are times I encountered the limits of the Smalltalk VMs over the size of methods. I learned that Smalltalk was developed/booted in a LISP before becoming self compiling. Since switching to lisp I still miss the Smalltalk UI when I want to display work.
Many of my project that really needed graphic display can now use CLOG. Smalltalk had a low of graphic primatives and CLOG is adding the html view to almost any project.
There is a Smalltalk development technique where the programmer traps the DoNotUnderstand message implements various methods and restarts the evaluation. This allows various “protcol” type systems to be written in small pieces as needed.