we need to keep in mind that many things were still emerging when the core language was designed - 1982 specs appeared with the first language book published in

we need to keep in mind that many things were still emerging when the core language was designed - 1982 specs appeared with the first language book published in 1984. CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System) for example was mostly a research project, whose first spec was published in 1988, the Meta-object Protocol book was published in 1991 - which was unusual, since one would standardize on common practice. Stuff like networking and multithreading existed in very different ways or only very primitive. Networking usually meant to interface to the local platform network stacks and multithreading was still largely unsolved - parallel Lisp was still a research subject, even though thread/concurrency/parallelism support existed in very different ways - often 'green threads' (cooperatively scheduled) or for experimental machines (like the massive parallel connection machine). Now even my watch has two cpu cores and smartphones have even more cores.