Yes, CL does have its share of historical baggage and warts. Despite those, I think it's still the best dynamically typed language. The rich number types, with arbitrary-precision integers by default, single- and double-floats, ratios, and complex numbers all built in; macros; and multimethods -- CL still has major features that the other dynamic languages, rather inexplicably to my mind, have yet to embrace. It's also much faster than Python or (especially) Ruby, and would be much faster than JavaScript but for the massive amount of effort that's gone into JIT compilation of this now-ubiquitous language.
If you're coming from a Haskell, F#, or even Scala or Ruby background, you might appreciate my functional collections library for CL [0]. It expands the range of code that can easily be written functionally.
Even if you don't have that experience, you might find FSet interesting, but it will take a little longer to wrap your head around.
[0] https://github.com/slburson/fset