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Comment by eudox | Hacker News Reader

The reason I have stuck with Common Lisp, rather than bailed to Clojure or something else, is that the language is so fundamentally good -- Mature, robust, standarized, performant, compiled, gradually-typed -- that it is worth sticking with it, it is worth working to expand its ecosystem.

Regarding the ecosystem, Common Lisp has improved a lot over the recent years. We have Clack (Equiv. of Python's WSGI/Ruby's Rack), a bunch of web frameworks, an ORM, a small set of web-related tools built around those. It's certainly nowhere near the size of the ecosystems of Ruby and Python, but I think it's acceptable given the size of the community.

I do, however, think there has to be a movement like Fare's "Lisp library consolidation"[0] to, if not expand, improve the existing libraries: Build Github Project Pages, Sphinx documentation, a better-looking wiki. Just porting old READMEs to Markdown would be an improvement.

[0]: http://fare.livejournal.com/169346.html

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the language is so fundamentally good -- Mature, robust, standarized, performant, compiled, gradually-typed -- that it is worth sticking with it, it is worth working to expand its ecosystem

This is why I created https://wukix.com/mocl. CL has a ton of merits. It's unfortunate that people pass over CL because it's "old" or whatever (a worthless criterion if there ever was one). The language is great, and with a little house cleaning, CL can seriously kick ass.

Wow, I haven't seen the licensing model to use a language in a while. Many researchers are migrating away from MATLAB for that reason, and new projects are often not initiated in MATLAB unless it incorporates legacy code. How's this business model holding up?

Nitpick: It's not licensing for a language, it's licensing for a specific tool. Common Lisp itself is not proprietary (having a standard) and code can be portable across implementations.

To answer your question, I would say that the business model (of charging for licenses) is fine in principle, but developer tools is a very difficult business to be in.

Have you considered a student price, I like the idea of having CL on my phone (and eventually tablet) but the price is a bit step for me (and presumably other students) especially to get source code access.

That looks pretty cool. Did y'all reimplement Common Lisp, of take advantage of one of the BSD-licences ones?

Is your focus primarily on OSX/iOS, or equally on Android?

I'm emboldened by comments like these, and I don't mean to be harsh or dismissive. Maybe time to give it another try. But I'd like some acknowledgement of the problems, which I think is what the OP was after.

I do acknowledge (Or try to) that Common Lisp has plenty of problems. But aside from some design flaws, I think the majority of these problems are social, which in a way is a good thing: Fundamental characteristics of a language cannot be changed, but presentation and impression can and should be improved. What is needed is the right people making the right appeals to the community.

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