Common Lisp has these kitchen-sink functions and macros because it was a standard developed by a committee whose goal was to incorporate several popular implementations of Lisp that each had several decades worth of of cruft. Lisp was big enough business at the time that having several mutually incompatible versions of Lisp was making knowledge sharing and business difficult. And having a standard was important for many reasons.<p><i>update: spelling and...</i><p>The real philosophical differences between Haskell and Lisp are basically apples and oranges. Lisp&#x27;s composition strategy is the recursive application of symbolic expressions... the famous EVAL and APPLY. I don&#x27;t know enough about the theoretical underpinnings of Haskell to make any kind of apt comparison but my intuition suggests that to do so would be moot. They&#x27;re just too different.