These questions are good, but there's something important to remember before drawing any real conclusions about common lisp: The spec is older than some few readers here at this site. Most useful programs deviate significantly from the spec in order to deliver features that modern systems consider essential but were not of tremendous import back when the spec was solidified.<p>So yeah, Common Lisp (the spec) has a lot of weird warts, compromises, and holes. That's why modern lisps like Clojure, Nu, Racket and the like are so exciting: they're taking a set of very good ideas and moving them into our modern 2010 network-driven-high-throughput-SIMD-demanding cloud-computing-era. The syntax and the semantics of syntax manipulation coupled with procedure-oriented programming are a powerful cocktail that was only briefly given the popularity it deserves in our software engineering culture.