I'm not sure I'd want a clone of a Python style API; I'd rather have something that's idiomatic lisp.  I like Marco's idea of a spec, however beyond documentation (and that is valuable), it mostly means we can have multiple implementations, and I suspect they'd end up like everything else, half-baked, poorly documented implementations of the spec.

I think we can do a lot of useful work without cloning the entire Numpy API.  The real challenge, IMO, is what Marco outlines below. Getting the community to rally behind a single implementation that they didn't cook up themselves in their garage whilst watching TV and drinking beer. NIH disease runs rampant.  There are however enough high-quality starting points (libraries) that might be worth looking at. I think tpapp's stuff is good, with generally small codebase and an API worked out via actual usage in a real-world environment.

Cheers,

    Steve