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This is the story [1], told by Stallman. But yes, basically because Common Lisp was too big. That is also the reason GNU uses Scheme as a language for extension

• dan-robertson 5y ago
  Common Lisp was considered too big in its day but compared to many modern languages it is quite small (only 25 or so special forms, most of which are rarely used; few built in types). I think the problem was that there was still too much of a separation between the language itself and user written functions. Because so much of the language cares about object identity, one couldn’t write a portable hash table oneself. Making a data structure like a search tree becomes hard because there isn’t a good way to sort arbitrary objects of arbitrary type or embed a specific sorting function and type check. CLOS is both massive and poorly integrated. The language is full of features that are old (rplca), hard to compile (&rest, adjustable arrays with fill pointers whose data is from another array at an offset), inextensible (loop, +), half-baked (types), or difficult (pathnames). But it also misses many features (eg threads). Without a refreshed standard it is hard for the language to move forward while code remains portable. In some ways I think of Julia and clojure as successors. Julia has types and multimethods working very well together but drops method combinations, pervasive mutability, lists, symbols, and syntax for good macros. Clojure keeps the macro-happy syntax and symbols, bins the mutability, and makes the data structures more compatible, functional and efficient. Obviously this doesn’t have so much relevance to emacs past or present.