> There is nothing compelling about the language to people who aren't already Lisp people.

CL is expression based (like Rust, unlike other mainstream languages I've seen), has a concise macro system (more convenient than Rust's imo), has a GC (simpler to use than languages with manual memory management or RC-only), has a better developed ecosystem then some new languages (ex. automatic ffi generation; while buggy, tremendously helpful compared to writing bindings manually). And it's not pure as in Haskell. And it has type annotations that may be checked at runtime or improve performance. An implementation like SICL could make it viable to use it as a scripting language.

Any similar modern languages with better tooling/ecosystem? Perhaps Julia, haven't seen it yet.

Package documentation which seems to mostly consist of a list of variables and function names, possibly with a single sentence describing what the function does. Possibly.

it's paradoxical since lisp people weren't born this way, surely there was some appeal (beyond being influenced by teachings) ;)

I do think there are some traits like curiosity, open mindedness, and patience that make some people more susceptible to infection.

> nobody will ever advance the CL standard

And that’s a good thing.

I suppose, if you are happy with the state of things and the size of the current userbase.

I can’t imagine a single feature that would be worth a change, and I have plenty of complaints about the library.

I also can’t see how that would make it more popular.

I'll never understand why a language needs to constantly evolve to be popular. There's nothing fun about having to keep up with changes, and continuous development just screams to me that a project has not yet matured. When something is stable enough to just keep working for 10 years without an update, that's not a bad thing. When did that become the mindset?

For package management, we have:

- Quicklisp, which is pretty handy, since we can install and use a library from the Lisp REPL, without restarting anything.

- Qlot, that installs dependencies locally, and allows to pin them (yeah you can't do that with QL, although cloning a lib and using it is easy).

- ocicl, a new package manager from the world of containers

- CLPM, another new one

- Roswell, if you really really want to install libraries from the terminal (although Qlot does it) or to install implementations, or software.

I bet the ecosystem is bigger than many think: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl and anyone would be amazed by its stability.