The specification is limited, no doubt about that, but I am convinced that any modernization effort would end up in a huge mess with everyone trying to inject their own preferences from the languages they already know with no regard for the spirit of the original specification.
The spec is really valued by cl community and I guess I'll tell an unpopular opinion now, but I think there could be a place for an ecosystem built around one of the compilers like sbcl with all the old cruft removed and a really good all purpose standard library (similar in capabilities to the one of go for example). What that will achieve is that it will allow new developers to write the code without reading on why the things were designed is a certain way 40 years ago because of now forgotten os or hardware limitation.
Similar to what was done with neovim project
[0]: http://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited....
Lisp has a good all purpose library ecosystem, it's just informal rather than baked into the language, and I haven't had any significant issues with quicklisp since it came out however many years ago. Writing portable common lisp is not at all difficult and there is no problem like with say Scheme of one library needing a specific compiler. And libraries tend to have a long shelf-life too. How much of Python's standard library is old cruft with better alternative packages available now for example? Didn't they have to prune a bunch of stuff in the python2->3 transition? There is considerable risk in including standard libraries in a standard, and the risk is that those libraries will end up being outdated eventually. You want to add more potential for more old cruft to be in Lisp and then pruned again? Why? Just use quicklisp or one of it's alternatives that are cropping up.
Lisp is not Go, it's an agreement between many different parties about what lisp is, it's not a codebase under the defacto control of one organization, or even an informal group or "community". This is extremely valuable and recent events around Go show why, I am extremely glad that I never payed much attention to Go because honestly I cannot trust it's governance model, but a specification that hasn't been and won't be updated in decades I can trust completely, and if one implementation betrays that trust, I can always move to one of the many alternatives listed in the OP.
sidenote:
> I think every programmer that tries common lisp eventually comes to the same conclusion
if this refers to "Lisp needs more backing from the heavyweights", then OH GODS PLEASE NOOO! I want to write code that will run in a year without modification and won't have some corporation put spyware in my compiler while trying to convince me it's for my own good and have my IDE slurp my code to train some LLM to make it easier to pile even more pointless unmaintainable code upon the world. The "heavyweights" have shown themselves very poor stewards of the discipline of computing indeed.
What are you referring to? This is a literal question, not advocacy. I haven't been paying enough attention to know what you mean.
Which is how? Not been folllowing them lately, for obvious reasons, so interested to know how they react these days.
Constructive non-egoistic non-spin engagement with the critics / stony silence with compressed lips / furious rebuttal / muttered denial and then look verbally down at the plebs while giving each other group-affirming backslaps in their posh pubs? With guilty looks in the mirror after the party and then downing some Valium to salve their conscience and get some sleep?
A few years ago, after Common Lisp being my favorite language since around 1982, I thought that I might switch for my personal projects to Racket Scheme since it does have good library support. What holds me back is that I have found plentiful work opportunities over the last several decades with Common Lisp, but except for getting paid by Springer-Verlag to write a Scheme book, I have never been paid to use Scheme.
Also, to be really honest, so much of my work in the last ten years has involved deep learning, that I have somewhat reluctantly learned to love Python for writing short programs.
ciel --script myscript.lisp
It is not done, I am dogfooding it.
(edit) forgot to mention we can simply call ./myscript with the right shebang line. Gets as succinct as one can.
Quicklisp is the Common Lisp package manager from what I remember. It doesn't version its packages?
I.e. quicklisp 1.1 versus quicklisp 1.0 or libfoo 1.1 vs libfoo 1.0?