I can imagine that Lisp without the shitty attitude would be great. The shitty attitude that elegance and purity is so much more important than actually being able to talk to the environment a program runs in.
Elegance and purity are the last thing Common Lisper's care about. Common Lisp is a by-committee spec, after all. If you're going to characterize the "shitty attitude" around Lisp, it's much more about the language being pragmatically well-designed. Dynamic, but not unmanageably so like Ruby. Tasteful API design unlike Java. Performance much closer to Java than to scripting languages. Etc.
The original Common Lisp was more like a community work. It led to an understanding about the language in early 1983. A book about the language was then published in 1984: CLtL1.
The work on the ANSI CL standard started then in 1986 using the ANSI standardization process. An intermediate language description (not a work of ANSI) was published as CLtL2. The ANSI CL standard then still took a few years more work to finalize and publish a standard document.
