bradb <brad.beveri...@gmail.com>

Well written.  I'm am almost a complete newbie at Lisp, so please take
what I say with big grains of salt.
It appears to me that the CL community has a lot of inertia, the
language and the spec are old (read mature if you prefer), but few
implementations actually have full ANSI compliance.  Isn't there
something wrong when there are no ANSI compliant free implementations
20 years after the spec was written?  Most implementations are probably
very close, but there are probably still weird little cracks where
stuff falls out.
I don't think that CL will ever change, there is too much inertia.  I
personally think that the only way to get a better Lisp is to start
fresh, like Paul Graham is supposedly doing with Arc.  But he should
have released it rather than just talking about it.  I recently read
about ISLISP, which looks like it was trying to shed some of CL's
history, get a smaller spec and become a modern Lisp - but it appears
to have not gotten far from the ground.

In my very humble opinion, the only way to get a better CL is to take
the good bits of CL, Scheme, ML, etc and write a new Lisp
implementation.  Make the goals of the language sexy and cool so you
get nerds interested in the language and in helping implement it.  Make
interfacing to existing C/C++ and CL libraries as easy as possible to
leverage existing code.    Make performance a goal, not a side effect -
some people want to write code fast, lots of others want to write fast
code.  Many newer languages like Python don't get traction in places
where they would work well, not because the actual performance would
suck too bad, but because the perception that Python is slow.

Anyhow, my thoughts are that pushing for change in CL is like trying to
push water up hill and the only way to make a better Lisp is to not use
the name Common Lisp.

Cheers
Brad