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Having worked on one of the largest common lisp projects I have to say this is spot on. And monolithism it's not just visible on level of functions it's visible on higher level. Common lisp nudges you to write monolithic applications and it's crucial to keep many details in one head (in case of big project - many heads).

Also I think Clojure is scheme, so overall approach is different.

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No, Clojure isn't Scheme. Scheme has hygienic macros and pattern matching on syntax, which in turn Racket's `syntax-parse` library makes even better.

Clojure... well... has that ugly `defmacro` kludge.

EDIT: I was being kind of unfair. Clojure also has kickass collections in its standard library, which Scheme doesn't have.

Scheme is a lisp.

Also, yeah, Common lisp probably would push for monolithism. Lisp Machine Lisp, upon which Common Lisp was based, was very much built upon The Right Thing, monolithic tradition of MIT, ITS, and all of the lisp machines.

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