Ugly Common Lisp Data Type Questions
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So yeah, Common Lisp (the spec) has a lot of weird warts, compromises, and holes. That's why modern lisps like Clojure, Nu, Racket and the like are so exciting: they're taking a set of very good ideas and moving them into our modern 2010 network-driven-high-throughput-SIMD-demanding cloud-computing-era. The syntax and the semantics of syntax manipulation coupled with procedure-oriented programming are a powerful cocktail that was only briefly given the popularity it deserves in our software engineering culture.
When I hear people (including myself) wax eloquent about the beauty of Lisp, even Common Lisp in particular, I don't take that to mean that every detail of the design is beautiful, but rather, the whole of Lisp / Common Lisp is a beautiful programming system. I can look out my office window here and see a beautiful tree, though I know upon closer inspection I could find some flaws and imperfections in the tree. Perhaps a branch has broken off, or maybe an animal has gnawed away at some bark. That doesn't do away with its overarching beauty.
And there are features in common lisp that I really want to see escape into mainstream. Condition and signal handling, in particular, is an amazing thing that almost no language has a good answer to.