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The economics of this is interesting to hear.

GNU Common Lisp (https://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/) seems to have existed in various forms from the mid 1980s, but it was probably outclassed by the contemporary big tech companies.

Gnu CL also had problems as a Common Lisp implementation. It works (like ECL, which is related) by compiling to C, which is then compiled with a C compiler and the object code loaded into the image. This approach generates inferior code to that which an implementation like SBCL can achieve.

All the Lisp implementations needed more memory than C programs would, which limited their impact before 32 bit machines became standard. And by that time, C was strongly in place.

There's arguably also the part where it was, AFAIK, mainly driven by needs of Maxima and it's declaration (or so I recall) of focusing on CLtL first didn't help things either.

In comparison, ECL which forked from the same family seems to work out much better over time.

Another big user was ACL2, but that's been ported to SBCL (meaning, standardized enough to run on SBCL).

GNU clisp it's still alive, but I had troubles getting compiled under 32 bit with threads support needed for Bordeuax-Threads from quicklisp.

Well, there is this: https://www.norvig.com/java-lisp.html

>I think had there been solid cheap or free Smalltalk and Common Lisp implementations around 1992, Java wouldn’t have gained a foothold, though C++ would have still been very appealing to C developers, though perhaps if Objective-C were more broadly available to non-NeXT developers, it would’ve been a formidable competitor to C++ in terms of providing a “C with objects” environment.

100% agree. i think it is also interesting that in comparison to before lisp community of today is so supportive of free software, standing more on the left wing of the open source community.

Interestingly enough, the free software movement came about due to Richard Stallman’s frustrations with Symbolics, one of the Lisp machine companies that came from the same MIT AI lab he worked in. It’s just that RMS chose to reimplement Unix (GNU) instead of creating a free Lisp operating system, though one could argue half-jokingly and half-seriously that GNU Emacs is that free Lisp OS.

I understood it came about due to RMS wanting the source for the printer driver for the Xerox 9700 - nothing to do with Symbolics.

The printer driver situation was RMS’s last straw, but he was already saddened by the demise of the sharing culture of the MIT AI lab once Symbolics and Lisp Machines, Inc. were founded, and he spent a considerable amount of effort reimplementing features from Symbolics:

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html

There's a lot more to the history.

My favourite quote from some other participants was "he didn't see us at lunch not because AI Lab culture died, but because we avoided him"

Source?

I was about to say that, point to point. But, think about that. Unix was the cool thing from the 80's, so even if ITS was a hackers' dream, mixing Unix' utilitarianism with Emacs' Elisp hackability on top of that wouldn't be so bad under a proper GNU kernel + Emacs userland system.

There's basically one commercial Common Lisp left (Allegro from Franz), and they're focusing more on things built on top of the Lisp (like AllegroGraph), not the Lisp itself. So the free CLs have sort of won by default, and perhaps also by sucking the oxygen out of the room for expensive proprietary CLs.

Do you not count LispWorks in this? I haven't had a chance to play with the commercial Lisps myself, but anecdotally it seems to still have some currency.

I didn't, but perhaps I should have. There's a question of whether it's live enough to count, or if it's just in maintenance mode. The last release was in 2021, but there have been gaps that long before that.

Common Lisp hasn’t changed a whole lot since 2021. And it supports Apple Silicon, and it even has, apparently, a Mobile runtime.

I imagine that’s ticking the boxes for most of their users, and they’re not in the endless “security update” treadmill.

compare the last release dates

    2012 Allegro CL  9.0
    2015 Allegro CL 10.0
    2017 Allegro CL 10.1
    2024 Allegro CL 11.0

    2012  LispWorks 6.1
     2012  LispWorks 6.1.1
    2015  LispWorks 7.0
    2017  LispWorks 7.1
     2018  LispWorks 7.1.1
     2019  LispWorks 7.1.2
    2021  Lispworks 8.0
     2022  LispWorks 8.0.1

Looks similar to me. LispWorks also had patch releases in between. Both are on the market for more than 35 years. Both are mostly written with CLOS and thus are especially to update with patches, additionally to the usual ways to update code (-> late binding). One just loads patches (which are mostly compiled Lisp code) into a running Lisp and that's it. Alternatively one can save a new image with patches loaded.

When one needs a patch or a feature, one would typically contact them directly. Both provide patches to the users.

Franz has made that simple for the user, they have a relatively continuously stream of patches, one can call an update function and it gets the necessary patches and installs them.

SBCL has monthly (!) releases, where the user (that's what I do) would typically compile it from scratch using the supplied sources. Updating is quick, around a minute for a recompile.

LispWorks still exists and works great.

Java claim to fame was to be close enough to C++ but portable in binary form. This made it possible for millions of people to learn it quickly. Lisp is too distant from C++ to have had any change.

Which is funny because it was marketed as close, while in reality being quite different from C++: all methods virtual, interfaces, type erasure, no method overloading, no operator overloading, no templates, to name just first things coming to mind.

We've been fooled in 90s so easily!

For entry-level programmers making the transition to Java, those deep semantics like "all methods virtual" didn't matter, nor did the lack of features like operator and method overloading or templates. They didn't really need those to build stuff.

The killer "like C++" feature that made adoption easy was the "C/C++ like syntax, with braces and everything".