Lispworks 7.0 with Mobile (iOS, Android) Runtime
lispworks.com
lispworks.com
What's New blurb:
"New features in LispWorks 7.0 include a Java interface and improved Unicode support. There are new ports to ARM Linux and PowerPC/AIX, a 64-bit Professional Edition, and new Editions for hobby users at lower prices. Additionally, our new products LispWorks for Android Runtime and LispWorks for iOS Runtime target 'headless' Lisp libraries which you can incorporate into mobile apps."
Brief release notes: http://www.lispworks.com/news/news34.html
More complete release notes: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw70/RNIG/html/readme...
Price Information for customers in North America and the rest of the world except Europe, India, China (PRC) and Taiwan:
The IDE: http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-1c.html
The "Hobbyist" editions of the IDE: http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-1h.html
The mobile run times, which require the IDE: http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-lw4mr-1c.html
(The pricing pages suggest that the mobile runtime licenses are annual whereas the license for the IDE is for a single version and doesn't expire.)
And last but not least, the IDE edition comparison table: http://www.lispworks.com/products/features.html
Wish I knew enough Lisp to warrant buying any of these! But there is no way I would be dedicated to build an app in it.
The other thing I miss is live edits, though using TCP sockets while having the device on the same network will work. But I don't know how to overcome iOS security restrictions which prevent compilation of new code.
Being able to write AI for a game and all game logic in CL is complete fun, as usual.
For cost reasons, I use SBCL or Clojure for my own projects.
The prices below apply in the indicated regions only and are shown in US Dollars. [1]
LispWorks 7.0 for Android Runtime, annual license with free upgrades and technical support
€800
The other one is LispWorks, a small company in the UK serving a small market.
Food for thought:
http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/whatisit
A JVM, yearly (!) cost for a single server: $8000.
$500 is affordable for a lot of people. An iPhone 6 costs more. A vintage Symbolics Lisp Machine just was sold for $5150, more than ten times compared to a hobbyist LispWorks license.
That's an $11,000 woodwind instrument right there, and worth every cent if you are, or aspire to be, a professional oboist.
As Erik Naggum put it:
"why are we even _thinking_ about home computer equipment when we wish to attract professional programmers? in _every_ field I know, the difference between the professional and the mass market is so large that Joe Blow wouldn’t believe the two could coexist."
On a serious note, a good friend of mine recently evaluated Clojure and fell in love with it. Interestingly, he loves it for the same reason I didn't: the JVM.
He saw his life being made easier by great Java integration, I saw the language and tooling being hindered by having to target the JVM. I think we're both right :)
I did, and I haven't looked back — things that I thought would be complete road-blockers turned out not to be a problem at all (no CLOS, no conditions&restarts, Lisp-1, empty list not the same as nil, JVM). And there were things that made life soooo much better (concurrency primitives, STM data structures, ClojureScript, and, yes, JVM (it's better than you think)).
Even if you don't start using it, it's worth taking a look.
They are going after professionals who have been spoiled by commercial Lisp implementations for years and decades now.
I doubt that Clojure is going anywhere with that demographic.
And I'm absolutely certain that the existing Clojure audience wouldn't shell out a few thousand dollars.
Especially since Lispworks is building a language implementation and ecosystem (KnowledgeWorks, CommonSQL, CLIM) where the IDE is just a relatively minor component.
Not that clojure is a bad language(I actually like it quite a bit), but compared to the professional common lisp world, it's a baby. CL has an extremely high-quality and stable specification, dozens of very good implementations for pretty much every platform(whit several ones that are decades old, and several ones that are brand new), a community that simply refuses to die, and use cases where clojure would be completely inadequate. Not to mention the assertion that non-clojure lisps are not going anywhere is completely false, both common lisp and racket(hell, even elisp) are growing in their niches and developing their ecosystems. Books and libraries are being written, products are being developed, conferences and meetups are organized, businesses are started and research is being done.
1. Decision systems for stock and commodities trading.
2. Flight scheduling and flight price optimization.
3. Social network analysis and advertising impact analysis.
What all of these problems have in common is that they involve crunching a fuckton (the technical term) of data, sometimes in real time, and making decisions based on it. Some of the problems are NP complete and use genetic algorithms and other techniques to approximate ideal solutions. These are extremely hard problems.
It's also worth noting that many of these systems were started in the 80s and 90s and encode a lot of research and business logic which simply isn't yet available elsewhere.
I'd love to work on one of these systems, but unfortunately I've only been working in industry a mere decade and the competition in that area has mostly 2-3 times that level of experience.
Obviously mobile looks like an area where common lisp has better options(with this announcement that makes two commercial implementations, the other one being mocl: https://wukix.com/mocl).
How about crazy experimental operating systems? https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
If you want to write native(non-swing) guis LispWorks has that covered, and the open source gtk/qt bindings, while a bit unlispy work very well. Racket has a pretty cool framework too.
There is also the fact that a lot of programmers, rationally, or irrationally, simply dislike the JVM. Pretty much everything I dislike about clojure has more to do with the JVM than the core design itself.
Both lispworks and franz maintain success lists, so you can look at some of these projects if you want to see some areas where lisp has done fine:
http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html http://franz.com/success/
Clojure has better support for concurrency, very good JVM integration, and a better story around Javascript courtesy Clojurescript (vs. Common Lisp's parenscript).
While some people seem quite strongly averse to Clojure (see e.g. http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42) my opinion - again, that of a Lisp beginner - is that they both have their uses.
It's certainly possible to build web front-ends and API-based back-ends using Common Lisp. I know because I'm doing it now :)
Common Lisp is very programmable language that can still deliver decent speed.
It was the Lisp the most remote from this planet.
A LispWorks program (the Remote Agent) ran onboard Deep Space 1 and controlled the spacecraft 96 million kilometers away from earth.