[Jach]

This project? https://github.com/Syzygies/Compare

If Dotcl does have good performance, it would be interesting to try running Coalton on top of it too. Coalton syntax is probably not unusual if you are familiar with OCaml and F#: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton (Though I'd expect the performance of the typical use case of running on top of SBCL to still be better.)

From the same project there's the recently released mine editor that's trying to be a friendlier gateway into trying Common Lisp (and/or Coalton) than emacs: https://coalton-lang.github.io/mine/ Time-to-first-SHOUTING is still once you start a REPL though -- it tells you that your package (namespace) is CL-USER. I sort of think it's one of those things that grows on you, or at least isn't annoying after a while (until you need to deal with certain foreign function interfaces anyway), and it's an interesting possible convention to use SHOUT-CASE in docstrings to call out specific parameters or other function names instead of some @param, \param, @link, or what have you.

[dasyatidprime]

Re that last: FWIW, in Emacs Lisp (which is case-preserving and mostly lowercase by convention, without the legacy symbol case behavior of CL), docstring convention is to use single quotes for most literals and to use all-caps to mean the value of a local symbol—usually a function argument, but sometimes a variable introduced in running text for describing the structure of data or such. Last I checked, CL wasn't as consistent across projects, but I tend to carry the Emacs convention there when not conforming to a different local style, and wonder sometimes who would have their monocle pop off to see it…

[Syzygies]

Yes, that project. I keep thinking I'm done, but it's so much fun being a language tourist.