Last project I worked on had 9154 lines of lisp code out of which 4800 lines are utilities, that I've accumulated and written.

The utilities cover everything from hash, list, string, files, function, a simple version of prolog, some algorithms like bloomfilter, suffix-tree, a simple bayesian filter implementation and a lot of stuff makes writing code easier.

So it's pretty normal to have a large set of utilities that you prefer. It sort of ensures that the code doesn't become to large.

I use (hput hash key value) and (hget hash key) a couple of functions, which I have. So it's a bit verbose than hash[key] = value or hash[key]. But it lets me write stuff like...

(defexample cineworld-cinema-page

  (:record :cinema-listing

    (:name "ENFIELD")

    (:record-loop :film

     (:name "BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA" "BRIDE WARS")

     (:director "Raja Gosnell" "Gary Winick")

     (:starring "Andy Garcia, Drew Barrymore, Piper Perabo, George Lopez, Jamie Lee Curtis"
		"Anne Hathaway, Kate Hudson, Candice Bergen")

     (:record-loop :date

      (:day "Mon 26 Jan" "Tue 27 Jan")

      (:record-loop :time

		    (:listing "11:10" "13:30")))))

  "http://www.cineworld.co.uk/cinemas/22")

I wrote the code that reads that defexample macro and generates the data from it in 2 days. When I started I had no idea what the grammar was going to look like and how I was going to accomplish any of the details.