Novash

I know a little of Lisp. Not much, never went much far than 4th, maybe 5th chapter on PG's book. I did some exercises and I understand the power that Lisp brings. Maybe not fully, but I can see the potential. Before you ask, I used Lispbox to set it up, which gave me e-Macs with a Lisp extension, but which implementation I am not sure, although I know it is not any Scheme one.

Now, I am following all those articles posted here today about the Lisp's problems and they look to me quite similar to the Linux distro's problem, in that everyone has one that (s)he likes and disses (if not plainly hates) all others.

This, on the Linux world has prevented it from becoming the mainstream OS it should be, and gave Windows an undeserving and lasting afterlife. It could have died with the Vista fiasco, and it nearly did so, but now it is posing a serious comeback with Seven. Linux failed to seize the moment and Lisp is doing more or less the same.

Now, answer me these, since my knowledge of Lisp is severely lacking to make sense of it. If I am completely wrong about something, be merciful.

As far as I understand, Lisp has some 'low level' functions that are some sort of axioms on whom the implementations are built onto, right?

If this is true and everything on the language are built atop of those, or atop of stuff built atop of those (in n-levels), how can different implementations possible be incompatible?

If everyone is aware of the Lisp's problems, why isn't anyone moving to fix them?

Why, when one tries, the answer must always be another implementation with 'more' features instead of creating the cleanest possible implementation with 'the least' features allowing maximum compatibility?

I have more questions, but I need to understand these first if anyone has the patience to answer.

I am most grateful for your time.