[amno]

Yeah, that is great idea, and I agree it sounds great on paper. However, some time ago, I have come to a conclusion that it soon becomes quite verbose and tedious.

I think it worked better in the past when people used acronyms and very short names for function and variable names. Today, with self-documenting code style, names are longer for both functions and names. Constantly typing full paths gets annoying quite soon. Code is also more verbose to read and less code fits into 80 columns.

My personal conclusion is that I actually prefer to abstract those away with a proper name like aset, put, and so on, just to make my own code less verbose.

If they really wanted to simplify the language, they should have perhaps removed 'setq' and 'setf' and just kept 'set' in the language but with the powers of setf. Not to mention that users have to learn how to write own setf accessors, unless it is very simple stuff (the extra bit of magic you mention).

As a "simplification" of the language I think they have failed, if that was the goal. That does not mean that 'setf' is not useful. On the contrary, it is a very useful tool to be able to compute and set a "place", just shouldn't be sold as a simplification.