Common Lisp Koans
github.com
github.com
These are only infrastructure things, Common Lisp has language features which are just impossible in Clojure while it based on JVM.
Traction for one.
>Transducers? Cl got them too
Pointing to some random libs that implement the same concept doesn't mean it's part of a languages culture/ecosystem/common practice as transducers are to closure.
E.g. I could say "Rails? Well, language X has a rails like framework too", but that wouldn't mean you get the same benefits of using that framework over rails, when you include language adoption, community vibrancy, availability of programmers to hire, tooling, books, etc.
Everything else you mentioned is about community only, and doesn't apply directly to the language.
E.g. if you have a good language without a community, community can eventually grow, but you can use the language anyway.
If you have a bad language with great community - it doesn't reduce your suffering from the language itself.
My experience has been the inverse.
I'd rather use a bad, or usually mediocre language WITH community, tooling, libs, books, programmers etc, than a better one where I'll be burdened by the lack of all of these.
So, in a sense, community tramps inherent language qualities.
After all that's the very basic message from Lisp and Smalltalk.
Yes, this approach is not the best approach to getting mass adoption, and there are benefits to mass adoption — people can help you, there's a bigger pool of people to hire, etc (I think its much more important to companies than individuals). But mass adoption isn't always the goal. I suppose you can consider Ruby analogous to Ubuntu while common lisp is like a *bsd distribution (or arch, gentoo, slack...). Ubuntu is great, all Ubuntu installations start from the same starting point, and the potential for customization is limited (try changing Ubuntu's init system), so you can just ask a question on stack overflow and get an answer with instructions specific to how your system works. And companies are more likely to pick Ubuntu than gentoo, because its better supported and supposedly more stable. That doesn't mean that people consider the distributions where the user can pick and choose exactly what their system does (like a common lisp programmer does by picking out libraries of macros) to be any worse of a distribution. Quite the contrary, the mythos seems to consider these distributions better in some way, like they're a better tool for a more skilled practitioner, a sentiment which has also found its place around common lisp.
And that "whole point" hasn't worked very well as to the availability of a rich library ecosystem and/or adoption. So, while it's a nice trait to have, it's perhaps too much of a burden.
>But mass adoption isn't always the goal.
True, but it's not like CL was designed like some researchy or experimental project that doesn't care about mass adoption.
There's evolution and there's running in circles. :-p
Few languages really evolve fast in a meaningful sense. The only examples that come to my mind are Haskell, Racket and pre-1.0 Rust. And the first two are research languages. Breaking changes (e.g. Python 3) to get rid of accumulated cruft can be a good thing, but nevertheless stability is a feature.
2. Depending on the implementation it can be really fast.
3. Depending on the implementation, support for typing and type inference.
+more. It's a much bigger language with a kitchen sink of features.
Clojure is also very fast thanks to running on the JVM and it supports type hinting. There's also core.typed for static typing support.