[gongador]

The plan for Common Lisp originally was to have a "core" and a standard library. From Daniel Weinreb's blog post "Complaints I’m Seeing About Common Lisp":

    It’s just too big. Actually, the real problem is that the core of the language is not cleanly separated from the built-in libraries.  The Common Lisp designers had originally intended to do this separation, but there wasn’t time enough.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100706204555/http://danweinreb...

(Daniel Weinreb was, among other things, one the designers of Common Lisp.)

Zach Beane has some more information on this at https://xach.livejournal.com/319717.html

EDIT: "time enough", in the quote, may seem strange; after all, work began in 1984 and the standard was finalized in 1994. But remember that many stakeholders were companies with jobs to do, and they had to assign employees to the design/standardization work at real costs for said companies.