The statement was many of the open source libraries written in Common Lisp are half-baked, incomplete, unmaintained and tasteless.

Qt, Scipy/Numpy and others are amongst the best libs available for their target language, but many other are really bad. It's just that the natural selection has been occurring for a longer time and the total libs population is bigger. Also when developing a lib in eg. Python, it's easier to get feedback as there are potentially many more users.

EDIT: formatting

Well, good libraries like those don't appear overnight, and a good environment for developers, with good tools, is proven to attract developers.

Lisp has been around for a lot of nights.

The pattern I've sometimes seen in the CL community (and others) is the notion that "Well, if thing was so great, somebody would probably have created it for me by now." It actually takes individual effort and creativity to make progress - useful things don't just spring up out of nowhere. Someone made SLIME. It took until this century to do it.

People get used to their working environment, and find ways to solve problems even in the absence what, in hindsight, are amazingly useful tools. When you pitch something new to people, they basically have to imagine to some degree how their life will be improved with it. (Will Wright talked about this regarding videogame box design and The Sims. People pick up a box and then have to basically design the game themselves in their head and imagine how much fun, or not, it would be.)

Anyway, I hope Quicklisp will be an easy sell, because I think it works pretty well where everything before it has worked pretty poorly. It won't take a lot of imagination to see that.

"Well, if thing was so great, somebody would probably have created it for me by now."

If you play this game in the Perl or Python or Java communities, you get a very different average than Lisp. Not saying that that's a good or bad thing, mind, but it is true.

It's a good way to get complacent in any environment.