I'm sorry, but I strongly disagree. Lisp's problems are not technical, they're social. We have a commercial-grade open-source lisp compiler. It's SBCL. And we have really excellent models for tools. If someone would extract SLIME from emacs and into an editor with less history behind it and more popular appeal, you'd have most of the tools you need.
Lisp is suffering because its community is fragmented and it has no leaders. Name a popular language that doesn't have an iconic corporation or person behind it, rallying and focusing the community? That condition is actually quite rare.
I think the reason why that is not likely to catch on is that most Lisp hackers enjoy using an editor that can itself be hacked in Lisp. Also, emacs is one of the most stable pieces of software in history. It will probably live forever and continue to evolve.
Also, I think that Lisp isn't really suffering. As far as I can tell there has been increasing interest in Lisp. Even without that trend continuing, Lisp is such a masterpiece (and it continues to develop with new innovations), that it is almost definitely here to stay, regardless of whether it becomes a trendy language to use again. The advantages in performance (say SBCL's for example) and expressiveness over other dynamic languages like Ruby and Python afford Lisp developers an actual advantage, as opposed to a merely perceived one.
>It's SBCL. And we have really excellent models for tools. If someone would extract SLIME from emacs and into an editor with less history behind it and more popular appeal, you'd have most of the tools you need.
SBCL port to Windows is a work in progress. And what you're saying about tools is more or less that they doesn't exist... yet. And comparing what you need to know and set up to start working with open source Lisp and other environments is... not fair.
So what? Lots of software gets written without ever touching Windows. I've based my entire career on it. An environment can certainly be mature and commercial quality without being multi-platform.
> And comparing what you need to know and set up to start working with open source Lisp and other environments is... not fair.
I do wish that SBCL had a "everything you need to know in 10 minutes or less", but it comes with ASDF and ASDF-INSTALL pre-configured. I mean, the amount of stuff you need to know to start working with Java is pretty darn daunting as well, given that you need massive assistance frameworks, and there is no good central package repo. The reason more people go into Java is that they have colleges introducing them to it.
Yes, more could be done. But I think commercial, professional work is possible right now given the state of SBCL.
>So what? Lots of software gets written without ever touching Windows.
Except most people doesn't want to write "lots of software", but software that fills certain requirements, often customers' requirements: run on Windows, do threads, have a rich GUI, minimize to tray, detect screensaver, interface to word processor, customer's database, customer's crappy ERP, etc.
>the amount of stuff you need to know to start working with Java is pretty darn daunting as well,
I've done both starts (Java and Lisp) and I can't disagree more.
>But I think commercial, professional work is possible right now given the state of SBCL.
It depends on your requirements. For some environments that's not true at all.
> It depends on your requirements. For some environments that's not true at all.
Which is true of nearly every commerical software environment out there. Why does Lisp get such a brutal grading compared to something like MS's CLR or Cocoa? Those are definitely commercially viable platforms that also don't meet these requirements.
Huge APIs. Specially GUI. Big community. Many tools.
Did I say GUI? GUI. GUI. GUI. Web apps are nice, free you from slavery, all that. But for a lot of tasks there is no other practical option than desktop apps, and that's what a lot of people use, even if they don't write blogs or appear in hip news, so they're invisible.
So there are no GUI frameworks on common-lisp.net/projects? And suddenly SWIG doesn't bind to CFFI?
I appreciate your concern, but you seem somewhat ignorant to the number and quality of software libraries available to most common lisp implementations. There are excellent GTK bindings and Objective-C bindings. I'm not sure about what's available on the Windows site (although I guess I should learn, given the events of this week).
And as for the community, you have me there. The Lisp community is indeed fractured and weird. But, uh, at the end of the day I think this is a wash. People do great things in unusual languages all the time. It's not like EngineYard or I have a massive Erlang community bolstering our efforts on Fuzed and Vertebra, but we're making progress and doing what I consider to be good work.
SBCL: is it as good as Allegro? I haven't seen an IDE as beautiful and comfortable to work with as Allegro (although I'm barely a Lisp hacker, just a fan).
I don't know what metrics you'd use to decide it's "better". Certainly the native code generation on SBCL is pretty darn good.
I think Allegro has better tools and libraries, but SBCL is certainly suitable for professional work. At this point we're talking about matters of degrees.
Lisp is suffering because its community is fragmented and it has no leaders. Name a popular language that doesn't have an iconic corporation or person behind it, rallying and focusing the community? That condition is actually quite rare.