This is a strange article. Let's address his complaints in two basic areas: 1. Community. The Lisp community as typified by #lisp and comp.lang.lisp can be r

This is a strange article. Let's address his complaints in two basic areas: 1. Community. The Lisp community as typified by #lisp and comp.lang.lisp can be remarkably acerbic to the point of toxic, depending on who feels like contributing at the time. Part of this are the annoying trolls that show up; one's patience wears thin. A FAQ document might go a ways. However, there are a large number of people who don't ream newbies out and really are helpful. lispm here on HN is one of the friendliest Lispers out there and actually has helped me out tons. Addendum: r/lisp on Reddit is good for generalish Lisp questions. StackOverflow's common lisp tag almost always gets an answer to most any reasonable question. sbcl-devel mailing list is useful if you want to take the time to posit in-depth technical questions to the SBCL developers. Lispforum, oddly enough, I haven't used much. I simply don't go there much. I should, I suppose. :) 2. Technical. I can do no better than quote my /r/lisp post on this (r/lisp is really good for lisp help). --- First of all, consistency. A variety of things are peculiar in how they are named. TERPRI? Really? Second, Common Lisp is a (the?) programmable programming language. CLUEL-esque platforms could be used to drive CDR adoption and cleanups of the original language. My primary gripes with CL are the lack of CDR-2, lack of CDR-8, the lack of hierarchical namespaces, the funky naming conventions & expectations[1], and the lack of deeper CLOS integration[2]. [1] ELT vs AREF vs NTH, for instance. Or, LOOP for lists vs arrays vs (your data structure here). [2] See CDR-8.