Three thoughts (in the context of Common Lisp specifically):

- Every day that passes, the gulf between Lisp's tooling and what a typical user expects grows wider. It needs to escape Emacs and SLIME to something that feels complete and polished.

- There needs to be a little bit of a culture shift around Lisp to actually write programs that do things. How many programs can you download via apt or brew that are written in Lisp? They're executables at the end of the day so nothing in principle stops this from happening, but there's just a thread of modern Lisp culture where it's more fun to play around in the REPL and write creative libraries than to ship. (There are notable exceptions of course.)

- I personally like the quirkiness of Common Lisp, but there are so many ways to write it (imperative, functional, etc.), so many ways to structure your programs (one package, package per file, package inferred system, etc.), and so many ways to offer APIs (plain old data and functions, generic function protocols, etc.) that it makes it a combination of confusing and intimidating. I think shifting toward something a little more structured and disciplined like Coalton, while still giving the escape hatches to all of Common Lisp, would help a lot of people "join in" on building new code or building upon existing code.