You've missed my point. I used gofmt as an example of a tool that exists because programmers like to do things multiple ways, even when it can be beneficial to do things in a standardised way.

The formatting of Lisp is not what I was referring to, it was the flexibility of the language. Lisp encourages writing DSLs. DSLs by their nature are opinionated. The only way to stop the language going in lots of directions at once is to have a canonical implementation of supporting features to work against. My point was that without a package manager, this focus was not as strong as it should be, but there's a hope that with standardisation on packages the language would grow with a sense of direction.

To use another example, look at how many implementations of CL and Scheme there are, why does all this fragmentation exist? What barriers are in place for coders working on extending a smaller subset of implementations?

http://www.cliki.net/Common+Lisp+implementation

http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-standards#implem...

For what it's worth, I'm not saying this is a Lisp-only trait (for another example in the computing world, just look at how many Linux distros exist), but the simplicity and flexibility of Lisp does lend itself to fragmentation. Whether this is a good thing or not is a matter of debate.

Out of interest, what impact have you noted since Quicklisp began being used?