[kazinator]

Programming with a lot of higher order functions won't feel as clean in Common Lisp due to the #' and funcall.

Basic Lisp programming with lists is a lot cleaner in a Lisp in which the empty list is false, and in which accessing nonexistent parts of a list (including the empty list) is a safe no-op that yields nil.

Ashwin Ram's (cdr (assq key a-list)) almost works in Common Lisp in the form of (cdr (assoc key a-list)). See: https://ashwinram.org/1986/01/28/a-short-ballad-dedicated-to...

Imperative programming is better supported in Common Lisp because the evaluation of the arguments of most forms, including function calls, is ordered, mainly left to right, so side effect embedded in expressions will show stable, portable behavior. Scheme function calls have unspecified evaluation order, much like C. (In Common Lisp, the only unspecified aspect is whether the function cell is sampled before the arguments are evaluated, or just before the function is called. It's extremely rare for the arguments of a function call to be redefining the function cell, needless to say.)

Common Lisp forms return a predictable value. If it doesn't make sense for a form to return a value, its value is not "undefined", but either just nil or else "no values". When a value returns no values, and an attempt is made to use its value anyway, then nil is produced as the value. You will not see some annoying #<undefined> in a Lisp REPL coming from a procedural construct.