The same WAS true for scheme: Scheme's spec is fairly minimal, and for many years there was no standard way to handle external dependancies, so such deps were f

The same WAS true for scheme: Scheme's spec is fairly minimal, and for many years there was no standard way to handle external dependancies, so such deps were frowned upon in the tiny amount of portable code that existed. SLIB, SXML, and a handful of SRFIs were all you could really depend on. Hell, even Binary I/O wasn't standard. With R7RS, hopefully we can have a larger set of portable code, and fix this problem. But yeah, these kind of abstractions ARE just part of how lisp is designed. The rule is, if you see an idiom in your code, abstract it as a function or a macro.