Ignoring &quot;What <i>exactly</i> does&#x27;Lisp&#x27; mean?&quot;<p>The comparison to Common Lisp ignores its past {faulkner_quote}. Common Lisp has roots in the days before including a standard library was common practice. In part this is simply a design decision. In part it is the fact that compiling &quot;remove-if-not&quot; to binary implementation of the compiler&#x2F;interpreter saved compile time; disk space; and facilitates REPL development. It also probably made distribution simpler in the pre&#x2F;proto internet days when decisions were made.<p>By the time Common Lisp was standardized, it had many years of deployment in the field on commercial projects. The standard reflects use. Haskell&#x27;s standard reflects a closer connection to Computer Science than to working programmers, e.g. threads are not part of the Haskell language standard, they&#x27;re an extension incorporated by the ubiquitous Glascow Haskell Compiler [1]. ANSI Common Lisp rolled up similar extensions from a diversity of commercial and open compilers into the standard. It&#x27;s an industry consensus document that results from commercial success. By contrast GHC maintainers are perhaps &quot;benevolent oligarchs for life&quot;: a person who is offended by the impurity is free to &quot;write their own Haskell compiler and make it popular.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downloads.haskell.org&#x2F;~ghc&#x2F;7.0.4&#x2F;docs&#x2F;html&#x2F;users_guide&#x2F;lang-parallel.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downloads.haskell.org&#x2F;~ghc&#x2F;7.0.4&#x2F;docs&#x2F;html&#x2F;users_gui...</a>