&gt; standard developed by a committee<p>You know that Haskell was developed by a committee and was designed to bundle the various research streams on lazy&#x2F;statically typed&#x2F; purely functional programming languages?<p>From the Haskell history:<p>&gt; ... to discuss an unfortunate situation in the functional programming community: there had come into being more than a dozen non-strict, purely functional programming languages, all similar in expressive power and semantic underpinnings. ... It was decided that a committee should be formed to design such a language...<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;haskell.cs.yale.edu&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;history.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;haskell.cs.yale.edu&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;histor...</a><p>Now about Common Lisp:<p>&gt; it was a standard developed by a committee<p>That&#x27;s basically nonsense.<p>The core of Common Lisp was designed by mostly five people (the &#x27;gang of five&#x27;: Scott Fahlman, Guy Steele, David Moon, Daniel Weinreb, and Richard P. Gabriel) in 1981&#x2F;82. This group was supported by various Common Lisp implementors - around 30 people. Steele wrote the book on Common Lisp the Language and published it in 1984.<p>The ANSI Committee to expand and clean-up the language was set up years later.<p>&gt; incorporate several popular implementations of Lisp that each had several decades worth of of cruft<p>That&#x27;s also nonsense. Common Lisp is mostly based on a single language: Lisp Machine Lisp (aka Zetalisp), which is an extended version of Maclisp. Groups developing other successors to Maclisp joined: NIL, Spice Lisp and S1 Lisp. Lots of things in Zetalisp were new in Lisp and it took quite some time to get it into Common Lisp, which itself also brought new things into Lisp (like type annotations, sequences, ...).<p>So Common Lisp is directly based on Lisp Machine Lisp, which only was a few years old. NIL, S1 Lisp and Spice Lisp were brand new and morphed into Common Lisp. Spice Lisp was morphed into CMU Common Lisp, which forked the now popular SBCL.<p>The style to use keyword arguments in parameter lists was brand new in Lisp. It appeared in Lisp Machine Lisp just a few years before. LML did get it from an obscure Lisp dialect called MDL (&#x27;Muddle&#x27;).<p>&gt; Lisp was big enough business at the time that having several mutually incompatible versions of Lisp was making knowledge sharing and business difficult.<p>Lisp was emerging as an implementation&#x2F;research language for the military. DARPA called for a Lisp standard, because they got several Lisp applications and each had its own version of Lisp...