That's cool, but I think they should really be working on a clojure IDE. It's the only Lisp that seems to be going anywhere.
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.
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.
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.