> but practicality of that knowledge is quickly becoming irrelevant just the opposite. When there is lots of interest in Lisp derived languages, the core langu

> but practicality of that knowledge is quickly becoming irrelevant just the opposite. When there is lots of interest in Lisp derived languages, the core language stays important, since it's the fountain for many ideas. > through influence of other respectable Lispers quotes But you ignore the context. The only real one critical about Common Lisp is Paul Graham, and he got rich and famous through a Common Lisp application: he wrote an online-store system in CLISP and wrote two books on CL, one of which is a real classic: On Lisp. But later he was critical and designed Arc as a very different take on Lisp: small language, small programs, small identifiers, for web programming. It's the one which was used to develop this website here on Hackernews. Guy L Steele, Gabriel and Weinreb came actually out of a tradition where they used Lisp systems which were MUCH larger than Common Lisp. Steele literally worked two decades with and for Maclisp and Common Lisp. Steele wrote the first two defining books on CL. Steele also has a much larger scope: he worked on things like Scheme, High-Performance Fortran, Parallel Computing with the Connection Machine (which started out with a parallel Common Lisp), C, Java, Fortress, ... Weinreb was working at Symbolics on and with Lisp Machine Lisp. He co-wrote one of the first object-oriented databases, in Common Lisp. Later he took those ideas to a C++ based OO-database. Years later Dan was back working with Common Lisp at ITA where he spent lots of time... I met him once in Hamburg at a Lisp meeting and he was happy then, working with SBCL and Clozure CL. Unfortunately he died much too soon. Gabriel worked on the Common Lisp design. He also wrote a book on benchmarking Lisp. Then published a critical paper on Common Lisp and THEN founded a company which developed a wonderful implementation: Lucid CL. He also was then working on the CLOS standard proposal. You are totally missing on the background and what these people actually were working on. Since the broader Lisp community is very diverse and always was, there were and are always critics in all directions. Some people think modern Lisp is too static, other think it is not static enough, some think it's too interactive, others think its not enough interactive... but you need to understand the context. Steele, Weinreb and Gabriel were actually the first designers of Common Lisp - the so-called 'gang of five' included also Fahlman and Moon. It's like claiming that Tolkien was critical of The Lord of the Rings, because it has too many pages, took too long to write it and there are lots of new fantasy books. Tolkien wrote that defining book - like Steele, Weinreb and Gabriel developed Common Lisp and Graham wrote a classic book on (Common) Lisp programming. There are lots of other things in the Lisp history and I'm happy that some people work to preserve those ideas - not wishing to ignore it and that they are dying. http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP