Comment by akater

> Bolting packages (module system) on top of symbols leads to some problems in practice.

Packages are namespaces, unrelated to modules. They are not used to organize dependencies but to remove ambiguity of naming and to provide encapsulation.

> The progress in CL development is severely hampered by the set-in-stone standard, small pool of users

The language is extensible, compilers do get new features added, sometimes in a coordinated manner. Standard being stable is not that significant an obstacle to moving forward; pool of users being small is much more noticeable. Yet more noticeable is that community is less healthy than the Emacs one. This comparison is valid because development in Emacs Lisp is attractive for the same reasons, unique to it and CL; they also happen to have extremely similar syntax. Elisp is moving forward steadily, and in recent years quite rapidly. CL would progress forward similarly, or better, had it had something like Emacs that provided that synergetic effect.