I spent a lot of time unsuccessfully bending Common Lisp into something I could love.

It's still one of my favorite problem solving languages, but far from trivial to fix from the inside.

Tried writing my own readers that compile to Common Lisp.

Then I ended up on a side track to write my own interpreters; mostly Forths at first, then gradually more Lisp-like and practical creations.

My latest attempt may be found here:

https://github.com/codr7/jalang