Yes, common lisp has certainly had multiple dispatch for decades. I think what makes Julia interesting is that the Dispatch Ratio and reuse is significantly hig

Yes, common lisp has certainly had multiple dispatch for decades. I think what makes Julia interesting is that the Dispatch Ratio and reuse is significantly higher in Julia than in other languages with multiple dispatch. Some of that is certainly attributable to the ways in which Julia differs from a lisp. See Sec 6.2 "Julia: dynamism and performance reconciled by design" in https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3276490 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3276490.