http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Incommensurability.pdf
I think Gabriel misidentifies this as a delta between science and engineering, but I think its more about the diff between communities. That we use different terminology, different sources, we have completely different underlying cultures. And you have to admit, the CLOS community is pretty unique, anyone looking from the outside is bound to have a very different frame of reference.
I've gone through as much CLOS work as I could, mixins inspired by an ice cream shop, active values (which are really just properties with custom get/set methods today) can serve as a nucleus for reactive programming but are not very sophisticated in managing change propagation (I think FRP signals are better, but you can clearly see the relationships). There is a lot there, but its not the end all of everything, their is some honest innovation going on here.
In Lisp you won't use 'nameless' functions. Typically one uses symbols, which are late bound to functions. Thus the symbol table is the map we can modify. In a meta-object-based object system like CLOS, generic functions are mapped to symbols and they have 'maps' of methods which will be combined at runtime.
The Xerox PARC researchers who defined CLOS worked a lot on the problems (mixins, active values, open implementations, meta-objects in software, ...).