Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

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Seeing Common Lisp fans arguing against Clojure fans is funny since your market share combined is insignificant compared with the mainstream choices. You should learn from each other and grow that pie together.

I also don't agree with you. Intuitively Lisp might be a secret weapon for startups, but not for open source where the communities of the mainstream choices are more productive, simply because of popularity. Java is a huge ecosystem of working and mature solutions. If you don't depend on Java, you depend on C. And for the kind of problems Lisp is suited for, I'd rather take Java. You're also missing the point on JavaScript. Say what you will about the quality of npm packages, but ClojureScript can reach people that your favorite CLisp cannot, due to the browser.

Also you can't seriously recommend ABCL.

Please avoid referring to the language as "CLisp". It's Common Lisp or just CL, of which GNU CLISP[1] is but a single implementation.

[1] http://www.clisp.org/

  > Intuitively Lisp might be a secret weapon for startups, but not for open source 
  > where the communities of the mainstream choices are more productive, simply because
  > of popularity

Open source is not a popularity contest. In fact, open source, and specially free and libre software, is a great place for leftfield technologies to flourish. In fact, Lisp had a place in free software before Github even existed, with various flavours being the scripting language of choice in popular projects like Emacs, Gimp or Gnome.

It is rather in the proprietary corporate world where there is often resistance to adopt languages outside of the mainstream. The more supply of developers for a technology is available, the lower cost of labour. It's hard for the merits of a technology to argue against this fact in the face of management.

Nobody who uses it really likes Emacs list and Guile didn't get far. Not the best success stories to give.

> Say what you will about the quality of npm packages, but ClojureScript can reach people that your favorite CLisp cannot, due to the browser.

There's always ParenScript: https://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/

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