5 ms·

I've made this comment before, and I don't intend it to be flippant, but am honestly curious. If Common Lisp is a failure, how is it that there are multiple co

by greggyb 10y ago

I've made this comment before, and I don't intend it to be flippant, but am honestly curious. If Common Lisp is a failure, how is it that there are multiple commercial offerings for it?[0][1] I would take the continued presence of these commercial offerings as a sign of health in the Common Lisp ecosystem. [0] http://franz.com/products/allegro-common-lisp/ http://franz.com/products/allegro-common-lisp/ [1] http://www.lispworks.com/ http://www.lispworks.com/

TeMPOraL 10y ago
What you see on-line is mostly the fashion part of the IT industry. Common Lisp is alive and kicking, but it's not fashionable (except maybe as a counterculture). There are many more stories like that. I was surprised to learn that Delphi is alive and well, and people earn their bread with it writing applications for various industries.
- snaky 10y ago
  It's easy to see the world skewed by blog posts. There's growing use of Perl[1] outside of the 'SF startup scene' echo chamber, huge quantity of new projects in Oracle APEX, power plant simulations in Tcl[2] and the gardens full of thousand flowers blooming. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df5Q4iPBNKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df5Q4iPBNKM [2] http://www.eurotcl.tcl3d.org/program.html#Zaumseil http://www.eurotcl.tcl3d.org/program.html#Zaumseil
lucozade 10y ago
> If Common Lisp is a failure, how is it that there are multiple commercial offerings for it? Well, one possible explanation is that they were sufficiently popular at one point that codebases were built that are large enough to need maintaining but too large to justify re-writing. I haven't had that experience with a Common Lisp implementation but I have with Smalltalk, Cobol and System-W (although the latter was eventually replaced at considerable expense). Obviously, that argument fails if the commercial offerings are relatively new and not updates of old implementations.
icebraining 10y ago
https://www.microfocus.com/products/cobol-development https://www.microfocus.com/products/cobol-development http://www.cobol-it.com/index.php?page=rwd_products http://www.cobol-it.com/index.php?page=rwd_products

by greggyb 10y ago

TeMPOraL 10y ago

What you see on-line is mostly the fashion part of the IT industry. Common Lisp is alive and kicking, but it's not fashionable (except maybe as a counterculture). There are many more stories like that. I was surprised to learn that Delphi is alive and well, and people earn their bread with it writing applications for various industries.

snaky 10y ago
It's easy to see the world skewed by blog posts. There's growing use of Perl[1] outside of the 'SF startup scene' echo chamber, huge quantity of new projects in Oracle APEX, power plant simulations in Tcl[2] and the gardens full of thousand flowers blooming. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df5Q4iPBNKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df5Q4iPBNKM [2] http://www.eurotcl.tcl3d.org/program.html#Zaumseil http://www.eurotcl.tcl3d.org/program.html#Zaumseil

lucozade 10y ago

> If Common Lisp is a failure, how is it that there are multiple commercial offerings for it? Well, one possible explanation is that they were sufficiently popular at one point that codebases were built that are large enough to need maintaining but too large to justify re-writing. I haven't had that experience with a Common Lisp implementation but I have with Smalltalk, Cobol and System-W (although the latter was eventually replaced at considerable expense). Obviously, that argument fails if the commercial offerings are relatively new and not updates of old implementations.

icebraining 10y ago

https://www.microfocus.com/products/cobol-development https://www.microfocus.com/products/cobol-development http://www.cobol-it.com/index.php?page=rwd_products http://www.cobol-it.com/index.php?page=rwd_products