A major goal of the COMMON LISP committee was to define a Lisp language with sufficient power and generality that people would be happy to stay within its confines and thus write inherently transportable code. We argue that the resulting language definition is too large for many short-term and medium-term potential applications. In addition many parts of COMMON LISP cannot be implemented very efficiently on stock hardware. We further argue that the very generality of the design with its different efficiency profiles on different architectures works against the goal of transportability.