[spacemanaki]

I've struggled with various Scheme programs not working in different implementations (mostly code from books like Lisp in Small Pieces) and have heard plenty about the fragmented Scheme landscape, but is this really such a big problem with Common Lisp? And is/was that really a big reason why Lisp has failed to catch on? (being genuine here, I have no idea really about the history and have only use CL a bit)

It seems to me that there are plenty of more popular languages with a similar glut of implementations: there are multiple JVM vendors, multiple implementations of Java (Sun/Oracle and now Dalvik, ...), many C and C++ compilers, etc...

This is total speculation, but it is perhaps because things like threads and networking were not part of the Common Lisp standard that there are fragmentation issues that impeded adoption? Or do you still think that canonical implementation vs language standard is that much better, in almost all cases?