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One of the things that really put me off Lua was lack of a strong central control and organization for the language, resulting in fragmentation.

How does lisp stand in this regard?

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It's interesting that you say that about Lua, because it actually does have a strong central control and organization for the language itself. The "problem" is that it doesn't go further than the language, large parts of the community disagree with their choices, and they tend to not care about backwards compatibility too much.

Lisp is very different in that area. I think that is because the language standard is large and doesn't change. As long as people want to conform to that standard, splitting up too much doesn't really make sense.

Depends on what you mean by "Lisp". In the wider sense of the lisp family, there are obviously many differences (Clojure, Scheme, Common Lisp, etc.). If instead you mean Lisp == Common Lisp, the ANSI spec - which is a really well-made standard - is common to all implementations and basically works; for what came after that (threading, unicode, networking, etc.) the commercial implementations have their own extensions, while the open source ones rely on libraries, some of which are considered best practice.

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