5 ms·

3100 is absurdly expensive when the price of development tools for pretty much every other language is zero. Even if it's that much nicer (which I'm skeptical),

3100 is absurdly expensive when the price of development tools for pretty much every other language is zero. Even if it's that much nicer (which I'm skeptical), to practically use it I'd also have to convince other people its worth paying that much since I want a community. And then it's proprietary on top of all of that? Yikes.

nerdponx 5y ago
Don't forget, that's an "enterprise" price and it's meant for "enterprise" users. Individuals aren't going to be paying that kind of money, unless they're independent Lisp consultants. By comparison, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate is something like $3000 for an individual license over the course of nine years. If you're not strapped in for a decade or more of Lisp, then the $3100 IDE probably isn't for you. 0: https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#commercial?billing=yearly https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#commercial?billing=yearly
- diskzero 5y ago
  Good point. LispWorks has licenses for non-commercial usage that are a third of the price of the enterprise licenses. I wish the non-commericial licenses cost less, just to bring more users to the platform, but once again, maintaining a viable company selling developer tools is difficult.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    I was going to ask about training and certification from LispWorks, so I went to the site and was tragically underwhelmed by the knowledgebase and anything else resembling Lisp training or certification. If the platform is as powerful as claimed, I do believe btw, then it will take some time. It is a learned skill. I guess where I am getting with this, if a company makes LispWorks and Common Lisp part of their long term tech strategy, I would think that LispWorks would be more of a strategic partner than just a tools vendor. And in that regard, they should be offering language training, tooling training as well as certification. This is the prototypical MS Dev playbook from the 90s and it worked amazingly well. Sheparding library standards is another thing that I would expect out of a company like LispWorks
    - lispm 5y ago
      Franz (Allegro CL) has training & consulting: https://franz.com/services/classes/ https://franz.com/services/classes/ https://franz.com/services/consulting/ https://franz.com/services/consulting/
    - diskzero 5y ago
      Very good point. I can only assume that their resources are so constrained that they don't have the ability to provide the level of training and support truly needed. There is a chasm that has developed, perhaps dating back to when many of the commercial Lisp vendors switch focus to Java, that needs to be closed. As you said, it is tragic in many ways.
- overgard 5y ago
  IntelliJ community edition is free and modern and well maintained, and if you're buying an enterprise edition you probably got your feet wet with the free version first. Lispworks for individuals is still close to a thousand dollars and from the screenshots I could find anyway looks ancient.
  - lispm 5y ago
    If you want to check out the look & feel of LispWorks, there is a Personal Edition for that purpose: http://www.lispworks.com/downloads/index.html http://www.lispworks.com/downloads/index.html
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      For what it's worth, IntelliJ CE has a lot fewer restrictions than LispWorks PE. This is fine for a software evaluation period / demo, but it's not at all equivalent to the IntelliJ free offerings: > There is a heap size limit which, if exceeded, causes the image to exit. A warning is provided when the limit is approached. > There is a time limit of 5 hours for each session, after which LispWorks Personal exits, possibly without saving your work or performing cleanups such as removing temporary files. You are warned after 4 hours of use. > The functions save-image, deliver, and load-all-patches are not available. > Initialization files are not loaded. On the other hand, I do wish more "expensive" software came with a demo mode like this (e.g. Mathematica).
      - lispm 5y ago
        > but it's not at all equivalent to the IntelliJ free offerings true, but for finding out the look & feel it's sufficient. Sometimes this also has been used in educational settings. For those who want to get a feeling for the full product, LispWorks has full trial licenses.
        kamaal 5y ago
        Sorry but this really feels like the Lisp people have something very precious and they want to be very careful and ration what and how much they want to share with common people. The entire ecosystem at this point screams that people who can't spend significant portion of their lives fanatically dedicated to the Lisp cause are better off not even starting with this.
diskzero 5y ago
I understand your point of view, but absurdly expensive is a very relative term. When I do a cost benefit analysis, I see that the cost for my use case is quite cheap. I have the benefit of only having to convince myself. That being said, I have worked at much larger companies who spent much more on various software licenses and wouldn't have blinked if I submitted an expense report for $3100 for a piece of software. The IDE is proprietary, but the code is all Common Lisp. If one had to leave the platform, or the platform went away, you might have a problem with the native UI layer, but not with any other code. The price does reflect the difficulties a company has when there has been a race to the bottom in pricing, or in the case of Apple and Microsoft, the floor was removed for development tools.
- overgard 5y ago
  For a company, sure, it's nothing. But the problem is if you want your community to grow you need to appeal to hobbyist and beginners and students etc. That kind of pricing model just guarantees stagnation, and who wants to invest time in a stagnant technology? Lets say LispWorks is like 50% more efficient to work in if you know it, but javascript is free, has 50000x more users and jobs. Why would any sane person go with LispWorks? Of course I'm guessing most Lispers go with emacs etc. but those tools are of course also a huge problem. I really agree with the article, Lisp is a lovely language but it would be much more accessible if I were using it in VSCode
  - diskzero 5y ago
    My issue with Lisp in VSCode is that it isn't really Lisp. Yes, you are coding in Lisp, but the language is just one element. I have tried the various plugins and they have a long ways to go. Unless you have tried an integrated Lisp environment, it is hard to completely describe it. I understand your point about the pricing, stagnation and the job market. This is a problem any language outside of the mainstream has, whether it is Lisp, Dylan, Erlang, Clojure, etc. Someone can always come along and promote Javascript or some other more popular language as a solution.
    - sitkack 5y ago
robertlagrant 5y ago
I think the OP already addressed everything you said.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
While I use SBCL, CCL, and CLisp for free I also paid for the $3100 professional LispWork license and pay the yearly maintenance fee. Recently, LispWorks stopped running when I updated my M1 MacBook so I had to just use other implementations for a short while until LispWorks gave me a custom built beta. They really do provide good service. If this seems expensive, in 1982 I got a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine that cost $25K, which is about $72K in 2021 dollars. Sometimes good tools cost money.
- arethuza 5y ago
  Around 1990, my employer paid about £40,000 for a fully loaded Sun 4 for us to run LispWorks on...
  - lispm 5y ago
    Our local AI lab paid that for a fully loaded (memory, disk, screen) Compaq PC with a Lisp license (GoldWorks).
    - arethuza 5y ago
      I was particularly impressed when we upgraded the RAM someone flew up from London to personally deliver and install it. It was a Sun 4/330 - big VME based thing. Edit: I checked and the 4/330 had a maximum of 96MB of RAM so the upgrade was probably to add an additional 64MB.

nerdponx 5y ago

Don't forget, that's an "enterprise" price and it's meant for "enterprise" users. Individuals aren't going to be paying that kind of money, unless they're independent Lisp consultants. By comparison, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate is something like $3000 for an individual license over the course of nine years. If you're not strapped in for a decade or more of Lisp, then the $3100 IDE probably isn't for you. 0: https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#commercial?billing=yearly https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#commercial?billing=yearly

diskzero 5y ago
Good point. LispWorks has licenses for non-commercial usage that are a third of the price of the enterprise licenses. I wish the non-commericial licenses cost less, just to bring more users to the platform, but once again, maintaining a viable company selling developer tools is difficult.
- sitkack 5y ago
  I was going to ask about training and certification from LispWorks, so I went to the site and was tragically underwhelmed by the knowledgebase and anything else resembling Lisp training or certification. If the platform is as powerful as claimed, I do believe btw, then it will take some time. It is a learned skill. I guess where I am getting with this, if a company makes LispWorks and Common Lisp part of their long term tech strategy, I would think that LispWorks would be more of a strategic partner than just a tools vendor. And in that regard, they should be offering language training, tooling training as well as certification. This is the prototypical MS Dev playbook from the 90s and it worked amazingly well. Sheparding library standards is another thing that I would expect out of a company like LispWorks
  - lispm 5y ago
    Franz (Allegro CL) has training & consulting: https://franz.com/services/classes/ https://franz.com/services/classes/ https://franz.com/services/consulting/ https://franz.com/services/consulting/
  - diskzero 5y ago
    Very good point. I can only assume that their resources are so constrained that they don't have the ability to provide the level of training and support truly needed. There is a chasm that has developed, perhaps dating back to when many of the commercial Lisp vendors switch focus to Java, that needs to be closed. As you said, it is tragic in many ways.
overgard 5y ago
IntelliJ community edition is free and modern and well maintained, and if you're buying an enterprise edition you probably got your feet wet with the free version first. Lispworks for individuals is still close to a thousand dollars and from the screenshots I could find anyway looks ancient.
- lispm 5y ago
  If you want to check out the look & feel of LispWorks, there is a Personal Edition for that purpose: http://www.lispworks.com/downloads/index.html http://www.lispworks.com/downloads/index.html
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    For what it's worth, IntelliJ CE has a lot fewer restrictions than LispWorks PE. This is fine for a software evaluation period / demo, but it's not at all equivalent to the IntelliJ free offerings: > There is a heap size limit which, if exceeded, causes the image to exit. A warning is provided when the limit is approached. > There is a time limit of 5 hours for each session, after which LispWorks Personal exits, possibly without saving your work or performing cleanups such as removing temporary files. You are warned after 4 hours of use. > The functions save-image, deliver, and load-all-patches are not available. > Initialization files are not loaded. On the other hand, I do wish more "expensive" software came with a demo mode like this (e.g. Mathematica).
    - lispm 5y ago
      > but it's not at all equivalent to the IntelliJ free offerings true, but for finding out the look & feel it's sufficient. Sometimes this also has been used in educational settings. For those who want to get a feeling for the full product, LispWorks has full trial licenses.
      - kamaal 5y ago
        Sorry but this really feels like the Lisp people have something very precious and they want to be very careful and ration what and how much they want to share with common people. The entire ecosystem at this point screams that people who can't spend significant portion of their lives fanatically dedicated to the Lisp cause are better off not even starting with this.

diskzero 5y ago

I understand your point of view, but absurdly expensive is a very relative term. When I do a cost benefit analysis, I see that the cost for my use case is quite cheap. I have the benefit of only having to convince myself. That being said, I have worked at much larger companies who spent much more on various software licenses and wouldn't have blinked if I submitted an expense report for $3100 for a piece of software. The IDE is proprietary, but the code is all Common Lisp. If one had to leave the platform, or the platform went away, you might have a problem with the native UI layer, but not with any other code. The price does reflect the difficulties a company has when there has been a race to the bottom in pricing, or in the case of Apple and Microsoft, the floor was removed for development tools.

overgard 5y ago
For a company, sure, it's nothing. But the problem is if you want your community to grow you need to appeal to hobbyist and beginners and students etc. That kind of pricing model just guarantees stagnation, and who wants to invest time in a stagnant technology? Lets say LispWorks is like 50% more efficient to work in if you know it, but javascript is free, has 50000x more users and jobs. Why would any sane person go with LispWorks? Of course I'm guessing most Lispers go with emacs etc. but those tools are of course also a huge problem. I really agree with the article, Lisp is a lovely language but it would be much more accessible if I were using it in VSCode
- diskzero 5y ago
  My issue with Lisp in VSCode is that it isn't really Lisp. Yes, you are coding in Lisp, but the language is just one element. I have tried the various plugins and they have a long ways to go. Unless you have tried an integrated Lisp environment, it is hard to completely describe it. I understand your point about the pricing, stagnation and the job market. This is a problem any language outside of the mainstream has, whether it is Lisp, Dylan, Erlang, Clojure, etc. Someone can always come along and promote Javascript or some other more popular language as a solution.
  - sitkack 5y ago

robertlagrant 5y ago

I think the OP already addressed everything you said.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

While I use SBCL, CCL, and CLisp for free I also paid for the $3100 professional LispWork license and pay the yearly maintenance fee. Recently, LispWorks stopped running when I updated my M1 MacBook so I had to just use other implementations for a short while until LispWorks gave me a custom built beta. They really do provide good service. If this seems expensive, in 1982 I got a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine that cost $25K, which is about $72K in 2021 dollars. Sometimes good tools cost money.

arethuza 5y ago
Around 1990, my employer paid about £40,000 for a fully loaded Sun 4 for us to run LispWorks on...
- lispm 5y ago
  Our local AI lab paid that for a fully loaded (memory, disk, screen) Compaq PC with a Lisp license (GoldWorks).
  - arethuza 5y ago
    I was particularly impressed when we upgraded the RAM someone flew up from London to personally deliver and install it. It was a Sun 4/330 - big VME based thing. Edit: I checked and the 4/330 had a maximum of 96MB of RAM so the upgrade was probably to add an additional 64MB.