>A bit off topic, but is Common Lisp still a good choice?
As always, it depends on your application. For instance I decided recently that I would work my way through the cryptopals challenges, and opted to avoid Lisp since bit-twiddling is such a pain in that language.
Since bits are addressable directly in Common Lisp, I found the language to be very very nice for bit twiddling. Maybe you're mixing it up with Clojure? (bit twiddling in clojure without extra libs is a PITA).
As always, it depends on your application. For instance I decided recently that I would work my way through the cryptopals challenges, and opted to avoid Lisp since bit-twiddling is such a pain in that language.