>My personal favorite WTF from CL was the :around methods from CLOS. These allowed you to wrap a function with other functions, possibly from a completely diffe

>My personal favorite WTF from CL was the :around methods from CLOS. These allowed you to wrap a function with other functions, possibly from a completely different place in your code base, and handle any setup/teardown as needed. We typically used them for database transactions, along with the ability to catch exceptions and trigger a DB rollback. Sounds like a not-so-appropriate way of doing it. I do this by wrapping my transactions... on a (with-transaction ) expression! Which is easily done using CLSQL (common lisp lib). This would do exactly what you want: exec the rollback, etc. Note that I speak from personal experience: this has worked perfectly on a commercial project. >Lisp brings a lot of power to the table along with relatively weak code organization constructs. A great example of this is the concept of package privacy, something that can be ignored in CL by using a double colon instead of a single colon. Sure, ideally experienced engineers would not abuse this, but that sure is a dangerous tool to leave around when deadlines are looming. CL is, mostly, for ideally experienced engineers. And i'm not being smug or elitist here. Ideally experienced engineers are able to leverage the full power of CL. >when deadlines are looming. And the reason to use CL is precisely to enable greater speed of development for complex stuff, so deadlines don't scare you so much (compared to using a lesser-featured language like Java for example)