I've always thought that CL needed a set of common libraries to be strongly recommended. The problem is that it has been tried before, but never really taken off.
However, given the recent rise of quicklisp for managing libraries, it's entirely possible that a project of this type will be much more successful. I hope so!
I still remember the first time I looked at the Alexandria library and realised I'd already implemented a good 1/4 of the functionality myself, just because it was glaringly missing from the CL core spec.
> I still remember the first time I looked at the Alexandria library and realised I'd already implemented a good 1/4 of the functionality myself
Yeah, same here. I have a bunch of utilities lying around from when I started that Alexandria would have completely obliterated.
I'm interested in cl21's use of symbol partitioning. I've always thought the `cl:` package was really, really bloated and somewhat confusing to newcomers. Something that divides everything into "this is for math" "this is for primitive data types" etc would make things a bit easier to manage.
I know /r/lisp didn't really like it for the most part, but since the spec is frozen it's nice to see people who are involved in lisp actively trying to make it better. The world is littered with successful projects that started out with people saying "You're wrong, don't bother doing this." I wish Mr. Fukamachi well and look forward to progress.
However, given the recent rise of quicklisp for managing libraries, it's entirely possible that a project of this type will be much more successful. I hope so!
I still remember the first time I looked at the Alexandria library and realised I'd already implemented a good 1/4 of the functionality myself, just because it was glaringly missing from the CL core spec.