Common Lisp is an oddity. It feels brutalist; a false, efficient, and democratic - even communist - vision of the future; a 60's theory that was never quite disproved, but also never quite succeeded, present as a story of computer science past, of McCarthy and Artificial Intelligence, of the optimism of the early computer age.

The language lacks facilities that are common or easy in other systems. Robust package management, typechecking in most forms, and modern network connectivity tools are lacking. Abstraction and data representation, however - through the incredibly expressive macro and class systems - are more powerful than most languages today.

There are new alternatives - Clojure, Scheme implementations, and Racket each incorporate ideas derivative of Lisp's REPL, parameters, pattern matching, and macro expansion capabilities - but new communities are fragmented, iterated upon, nad constantly in flux. Common Lisp is a future that was never quite realized, and its ANSI standard means the languages is fixed to be explored - forever.