Ask HN: Will the committee that built Common Lisp make a new one in the future?
You have to think about this ecologically.  What niche would a new CL occupy?  What use would anyone have for something similar to CL but not identical?  How could such a thing catch on?<p>If the features you think should be added are just extensions, it&#x27;s very likely they can be added as libraries (though there are occasional exceptions).  If they actually change the language so as to break existing code, it&#x27;s very hard to see why anyone currently using CL would want to use your language.  The CL ecosystem is already considered to be behind other major languages in terms of library coverage; your new language would be starting from zero on that point.<p>I think the only way a completely new Lisp would catch on is for some company to create their own, and then to spend enough years using it for enough different things that they create an adequate library on their own -- requiring that they get pretty large.  But why would a small company, just starting out, create their own Lisp when they could use CL?  (Okay, okay, of course PG did exactly that with Arc.  But it&#x27;s still an unusual choice.)<p>CL is unusually mutable as languages go, anyway.  It&#x27;s even possible for a library to turn it into a subtly but pervasively different language -- I think my functional collections library, FSet [0], is a great example.  And of course, this is done without breaking existing libraries.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;slburson&#x2F;fset" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;slburson&#x2F;fset</a>