I think of function composition as a basic operation, one used regularly in any functional language. But if it's really so common, how could I forget Common Lisp doesn't have it? It has identity and complement and plenty of high-order collection operations, so naturally one might expect it to have compose too. I assumed it did, and was recently surprised to hear otherwise. Evidently I've never tried to use it and found it missing.
This says something about how little high-order style is used in Common Lisp. With the annoyance of #', and no convenient partial application, and no lambdaless define in the function namespace, almost all functions are written with a (possibly implicit) lambda; uses of compose are not very common. Common Lisp may be more expressive than most languages, but it's still far from pseudocode.
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