The real reason to learn SBCL, is because that is an existence proof that garbage-collected multi-paradigm (procedural, functional, object-oriented) dynamic lan

The real reason to learn SBCL, is because that is an existence proof that garbage-collected multi-paradigm (procedural, functional, object-oriented) dynamic languages don't have to suck performance wise (speed and memory usage). I'm going to go off the rails and say that 'defmacro' isn't the reason one should use a lisp. ~90% of 'defmacro' instances are really just to prevent evaluating expressions, which could also have been done with a lighter syntax (e.g. reader macro) for lambda (smalltalk for instance). Why didn't lisp catch on? Some 30-40% of people really hate parenthesis with a passion. There is no accounting for taste I guess. Lisp advocates also spent too many decades comparing lisp to C (instead of Python or Haskell or Java). And it seems like there was at one time a faction that looked down on free-software/GPL for a while, so there wasn't as much activity that people (especially college students) could see and engage with. The standard library is sparse and could use a CLOSified refresh, but everyone disagrees on how that should look. Too many lofty promises of 10x or greater productivity gains, and not enough wins showing it. Who knows, I haven't looked as common lisp in a while, maybe there are now vectorized/parallel array libraries targeting GPU's now that everyone uses, because things "just work" out of the box. Or a polished off McClim, or other lispy gui, instead of wrapping Tk. That combined with the usual network effects. https://www.sbcl.org/ https://www.sbcl.org/