The automatic distaste in our industry for things that are old is a disease, a form of vanity. Old ideas are not inadequate because they are old. Most great ideas are old. Sometimes, of course, an old thing is a vestige of some ancient limitation that no longer applies. Those ones are good to clear away. But the prevailing thought process in the software industry, no less dominant for its astonishing primitivity, is to reject the old per se. The will to novelty is so extreme that it doesn't matter if the new thing is worse, only that it is newer. We want to program in new languages like we want to drive new cars (a bad analogy in Common Lisp's case, unless you assume that the older car is both faster and more fuel efficient). Lisp in general, and Common Lisp in particular, is up against this dynamic. You can't understand the reactions to it without accounting for that.

That CL contains TAGBODY is a brilliant thing. It amazes me that a language can be at once so high-level and so low-level. I haven't had occasion to use it yet, but the fact that it's there, and that the higher-level abstractions are built in terms of it, is a thing of beauty to me. (I don't know about PROGV.)