What do you think about the article, “Problems with optimizing Common Lisp code”?
Fundamental problems with the Common Lisp language Common Lisp has some fundamental problems. (There are loads of little problems, but I think it’s more interesting to think about the systemic and big issues.) Here are some that I know about or have heard discussed by knowledgable people: * Too many concepts; irregular: A language should be intellectually concise, with regularity, and a disciplined approach to new language constructs, in order to make it feasible for a programmer to “get his or her head around it”. Common Lisp has too many fundamental concepts that aren’t really needed (property lists versus alists is a simple example). In general, it was a design-by-committee that was a superset of all the recent ideas that had been implemented in the parent dialects, plus compatibility with everything that had gone before. * Hard to compile efficiently: It’s too hard to write a high-quality Common Lisp compiler that generates very efficient code. Certainly experience to date has vali
