Whatever is gained in exchange for this additional syntactical complexity may not be valued in the same way by everyone.

So that almost certainly explains that reaction.

    (defun foo (&aux bar baz)
      (setq bar (quux)
            baz (xyzzy))
      ...)

First you will usually want to write small chunks of code, instead of a large soup.

Second, you can make intentional decisions with your use of newlines in order to highlight specific aspects of the code.

I find clojure more readable than most other languages… However, bad code stands out horribly (which is actually great if you have at least one experienced engineer in the team- I’d argue there’s nothing worse than bad code that looks normal). Just like anything else, writing good lisp takes some skill.

Your specific editor and its configuration will also have a big impact on your experience.

It's like Unix pipes for functions:

  (~> "hello"
    (string-ref 1)
    (char->integer))

      Iterate, in (COUNT I SOME-SEQUENCE): Missing value for SOME-SEQUENCE keyword

    WARNING:
       COUNT appears to be used as an ITERATE clause keyword, in this sexpression: (COUNT I SOME-SEQUENCE).
       This use is now deprecated and will cease to be supported in a future version. Please use the alternative keyword COUNTING instead. If you intended COUNT to be interpreted as a function call, instead of an ITERATE clause, you must find an alternative way of calling it, at present, perhaps by using FUNCALL or APPLY.

    (iter (for i from 1 to 10)
        (print (funcall #'count i some-sequence)))

The abstractions used in Calendrical Calculations sound good - and echo what I've seen elsewhere - so, based on your comment I'm now more likely to read it, so thank you for that.

[1] Does anybody know how to ping Kartik Singh about the coroutines implementation in SBCL? Apparently, he made an experimental port of the green threads implementation from CMUCL, but I can't find it anywhere online, nor any obvious way to catch anyone involved. Is the mailing list the only way?

I'm an idiot. I looked at this page: https://shenlanguage.org/TBoS/tbos.html many times, tried clicking on the table of contents, realized that chapter titles are not links, and went away thinking it's only the ToS for promotional purposes. I only realized that the page numbers are links just now. To my defense, they don't differ in color that much and lack the underline that often marks links. Still, a HUGE facepalm :D Thanks for mentioning this and making me realize my own stupidity :)