I think that this opinion is shallow. LOOP and DO are both standard operators, like while and for in C. To paraphrase: "Some people love the 'while' operator an

I think that this opinion is shallow. LOOP and DO are both standard operators, like while and for in C. To paraphrase: "Some people love the 'while' operator and use it everywhere, some others think it's ugly and use the equally powerfully but syntactically very different 'for' construct instead". You could make a case that some CL features are underappreciated, some are overused, and some are used chaotically by different programmers, but this example is not a good one. If you use the term "scripting language" as an indication, that Common Lisp is interpreted (it is often used in such context) - that is not true - language can't be interpreted, its implementation could - most Common Lisp implementations feature compilers to binary. The standard even provides you with functions compile and compile-file. Regarding communities: you've mentioned three (or four) different programming languages. Only SBCL, CLISP and ECL are common lisp implementations and they share the same community - because they implement the same standard. It is as if you had said, that there are separate cython and python communities - each implementation has its merits, but users of both are usually part of the same python community. Similar comparison would be between clang and gcc programmers. Many many Common Lisp systems work well on different implementations of that programming language (some with compatibility layers, some are simply portable programs).