My main beef with treating the Common Lisp spec as a sacred text is simple:
1. There were things at the time that were not quite standardizable that are now. Examples: Some degree of concurrency, system definition, the CLOS meta-object protocol, networking.
2. There are things that were created or became important in the meantime that should be standardizable now: Unicode and localization, concurrency building blocks like threads and locks and queues and atomic operations, cryptography, compression, higher level networking (URLs, HTTP, etc.).
3. There are just bugs and holes and incompleteness in the standard due mostly to compromise from the then current vendors. For example, not everything fits the sequence protocols, the language isn’t CLOS all the way down, streams, etc.
All this argues that there’s room for continued progress. The only good argument I’ve heard for why it hasn’t been pursued is “Who’d fund it?”
1. There were things at the time that were not quite standardizable that are now. Examples: Some degree of concurrency, system definition, the CLOS meta-object protocol, networking.
2. There are things that were created or became important in the meantime that should be standardizable now: Unicode and localization, concurrency building blocks like threads and locks and queues and atomic operations, cryptography, compression, higher level networking (URLs, HTTP, etc.).
3. There are just bugs and holes and incompleteness in the standard due mostly to compromise from the then current vendors. For example, not everything fits the sequence protocols, the language isn’t CLOS all the way down, streams, etc.
All this argues that there’s room for continued progress. The only good argument I’ve heard for why it hasn’t been pursued is “Who’d fund it?”