> 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 pop

> 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.