Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

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At 200 bucks a license there isn't going to be more than a couple people who are ready to answer stack overflow questions about this, there isn't going to be a good plugin to most IDEs, the tooling support is going to be poor in general and there is going to be libraries for approximately nothing (yes I know, it takes a lot less time to write them in Lisp, but it still means you need to dive into the Oauth spec to work with Twitter, whereas I can just download a library for Java that works).

I say this as a huge fan of Lisp and there was a time where it made sense to buy a commercial compiler - that time has passed, because when you buy a compiler and a new language you are also buying into an ecosystem, and the more people that are in that ecosystem the better for you.

I can see maybe using Lisp to do some special parts of the program, but even then there is Chicken Scheme which is free and already have a bunch of eggs (extensions), oh and it compiles to C too.

It's funny to me that people will happily spend $40 for a t-shirt, $100+ for a pair of shoes, $300 for an ounce of weed -- but ask them for $200 for a professional development tool and they won't budge.

I for one, think the price tag is reasonable.

The thing is that it’s easier to predict the personal value of a real-world item. You don’t know in advance whether you’re going to get $200 of value out of a particular development product, because there’s no reasonable standard of comparison.

You would pay $40 for a T-shirt if it were some sort of collector’s item you could resell. You would pay $100 for running shoes because that’s less than $15000 for knee surgery, and you like having comfy feet. You would pay $150–300 for an ounce of weed because you know what weed is like, and you like it, and the price is driven up by legal issues. But what justification can you come up with for spending $200 on what is essentially a productivity tool, if it won’t necessarily make you more productive?

The same justification I use for buying books on programming: I am trying to make myself a better programmer and I'm willing to take a gamble on myself.

But book stores, unlike the company that produces mocl, won't give my money back if I find that the book didn't help me within the first 30 days.

So in this case, it's even a relatively safe gamble (assuming of course, that the company does in fact, honor the 30-day money-back thing).

Well it depends on the book store really. For example Barnes and Noble lets you return books up to 2 weeks after purchase. Amazon allows you to return kindle ebooks, but I'm not sure of their policy on physical books. And of course you could always go to your local library and see if the book is available there.

I'm totally willing to pay for a great professional development tool. However, I think it's way too risky to use a closed source niche product in this day and age. I would have preferred something like the Ravenbrook licensing model: a viral open source license that would necessitate a commercial license to create derivative products or develop commercial applications.

We'll sell you the source code. That's not enough?

No, because it would still have extremely limited network effects.

I don't blame you or what you are trying to do, it is the nature of the beast. Introducing a new programming environment is hard enough when it is free, it is nearly impossible when it isn't.

For me, it isn't the price tag that is a problem. It is the lack of information about something that has a price tag. I would personally be interested in a product like this, and I have paid $200+ for development software before, but there isn't enough info here to let me know if it is worth it.

Fully agree, I still remember the days I had to pay for every single piece of software I was using.

Nowadays there seems to exist a trend developers should work for free.

"there is going to be libraries for approximately nothing"

You do realize this runs Common Lisp, right? There are plenty of Common Lisp libraries.

Maybe. CL has a bunch of different implementations that are slightly incompatible and some of the libraries (or their dependencies) have to be chased down on obscure FTP sites that haven't been updated in a long time.

Don't get me wrong, as a language is it the best that I know of. As an environment, it is not.

the eclim talk mentions that many CL libraries work with it so maybe https://github.com/fons/cl-twitter or https://github.com/skypher/cl-oauth will work?

Anyway, lispworks seems to be doing fine selling their lisp, so maybe it isn't hopeless for wukix :)

Competitive acquisitions often result from this kind of development.

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