I stumbled on this literally in the same minute as I was about to start writing a program and wondering whether I ought to use CLOS. I don't think it answered my question, but it was interesting reading nonetheless.

Well, I'd argue that you should grin

I've had much the same experience that the Mr. Marshall describes with many aspects of Common Lisp: repeatedly, I'll discover that something which annoyed me (CLOS, packages, pathnames — whatever) is actually remarkably well-thought-out and pragmatically useful. It really is an amazing language.

Thanks! That is a solid endorsement.

I always find myself struggling with programming paradigms, having heard of so many and used so few. I love functional programming (to the extent that my ugly point-free-ish, heavily type-hinted Python is functional), but I also love how OO makes it easy for me to encapsulate logic and data. It seems too good to be true that I could have both, but here I am!