Package management kind of sucks, the ecosystem sucks, other languages continually improve but nobody will ever advance the CL standard. There is nothing compelling about the language to people who aren't already Lisp people.
CL is expression based (like Rust, unlike other mainstream languages I've seen), has a concise macro system (more convenient than Rust's imo), has a GC (simpler to use than languages with manual memory management or RC-only), has a better developed ecosystem then some new languages (ex. automatic ffi generation; while buggy, tremendously helpful compared to writing bindings manually). And it's not pure as in Haskell. And it has type annotations that may be checked at runtime or improve performance. An implementation like SICL could make it viable to use it as a scripting language.
Any similar modern languages with better tooling/ecosystem? Perhaps Julia, haven't seen it yet.
- Quicklisp, which is pretty handy, since we can install and use a library from the Lisp REPL, without restarting anything.
- Qlot, that installs dependencies locally, and allows to pin them (yeah you can't do that with QL, although cloning a lib and using it is easy).
- ocicl, a new package manager from the world of containers
- CLPM, another new one
- Roswell, if you really really want to install libraries from the terminal (although Qlot does it) or to install implementations, or software.
I bet the ecosystem is bigger than many think: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl and anyone would be amazed by its stability.
And that’s a good thing.
I also can’t see how that would make it more popular.