5 ms·

I am convinced that Lispworks is a great product. From what I can see it comes with a nice IDE and some nice libraries. I would have loved to give it a try, but

by _ph_ 4y ago

I am convinced that Lispworks is a great product. From what I can see it comes with a nice IDE and some nice libraries. I would have loved to give it a try, but unfortunately I was never able to do do so. And that is where the critique of the licensing scheme comes from. I am sure there are quite a few professionals for whom Lispworks has great value and the license costs are just a non-issue. But despite being a professional Lisp programmer for more than 15 years, I never came close to licensing Lispworks. Nor in the 20 years of being a Lisp enthusiast. As an enthusiast, I would be happy to spend a few hundred € for private usage, but not thousands. I would like to be able to really evaluate the product before spending a significant amount of money on it, but with the limits of the personal edition, it immediately quit on the first attempt of starting my back-then tiny hobby project. Don't get me wrong, a company has the right to select the business model which fits them best and I might not be their intended audience. But that is why I never bought from them and as I never used the product didn't really put under strong consideration when choosing a Lisp implementation for commercial work. On the other side, with SBCL I have a really strong Lisp implementation. The compiler is likely to produce better code and it is readily available. Slime might lack the fanciness of a standalone IDE, but as a longtime Emacs user, that might actually be an advantage.

kgwgk 4y ago
> As an enthusiast, I would be happy to spend a few hundred € for private usage, but not thousands. Note that the cost for private usage starts at a few hundred €. You only get to "thousands" if you include multiple platforms or several support incidents.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  Well, it starts at €480 (Linux) - €720 for the Mac for a pure IDE, without the ability to produce executables. You are limited to run your programs inside the development environment, this limits its applicability a lot. You can't write a simple command line utility this way, just to name one example. You cannot give it to a friend etc. The HobbyistDV edition is in my eyes the first really usable one. It is already over €1400, and that is for a single OS, a single CPU architecture. Especially as a hobbyist I might be able to play around with it a bit. I would be interested if there is any customer who has more than one hobbyistDV license. And that doesn't seem to include any updates.
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    > The HobbyistDV edition is in my eyes the first really usable one. It is already over €1400 Less than 1000 if you can live with 32 bits but I wonder if someone goes for that option nowadays. > and that is for a single OS, a single CPU architecture. The MacOS version supports both Apple Silicon and Intel.
    - _ph_ 4y ago
      > Less than 1000 if you can live with 32 bits but I wonder if someone goes for that option nowadays. Right. I don't count the 32 Bit versions as serious contenders. > The MacOS version supports both Apple Silicon and Intel. That is good news. For pure Mac users this is interesting, still very expensive. Personally, my development time is split between MacOS and Linux.
    - louis771 4y ago
      The macOS version is not available as 32-bit edition so it is twice as expensive as the cheapest 32-bit version. Also, you are not allowed to give a saved image away / cannot run it without the licensed LispWorks installation.
      - kgwgk 4y ago
        > Also, you are not allowed to give a saved image away / cannot run it without the licensed LispWorks installation. I think you're not talking now about the HobbyistDV version mentioned in the parent comment, are you?
      - lispm 4y ago
        macOS itself is no longer available as 32-bit edition, but as 64bit versions on two processor platforms.
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    By the way, this is not completely correct: > You are limited to run your programs inside the development environment, this limits its applicability a lot. You can't write a simple command line utility this way, just to name one example. You can save and run a console-only image which doesn't start the graphical IDE.
- hajile 4y ago
  Professional starts at $1500 for the 32-bit edition. That price doubles for 64-bit. Need to connect to a database and use their ORM? That’s another $1500. Want to do a cross platform mobile app? Add another $2000. Need windows and Mac? That’s another $4500 for each. A cross platform app would cost $15,500 PER DEVELOPER. I work for a fortune 500 company and they’d just say no at those prices. It’s an absolute no go for regular companies.
  - Avshalom 4y ago
    Okay but why would you do that in a large company, you don't need every single developer triple booting. You've got 150 people and 25 of are RHEL, 25 are macos and 100 are windows. and also the 5k license is a one time fee. over the course of say 5 years its 5100 [first two years] + (1125 * 3) [next three] = 1695 a year [asymptotically approaching 1125] if you want to target both mobile runtimes + (5 * 2000)[the mobile runtimes *are* annual although as with desktop you wouldn't actually need everyone to have both, or either] = 3695 a year [asymptotically approaching 3125] That's before any volume discount (I dunno lispworks but as a point of comparison Sicstus goes from 2550/seat to 1510/seat for just 20 seats) and unlike say Dyalog, distribution is free so only the devs need licenses not any one else in the org. I'm not saying it's cheap mind you but even at 3700 a year * 100 devs, if your bumping up against sharp edges in SBCL: 370000 only gets you 1-2 devs to work on those edges. At the size of a Google adding developers works out to be cheaper than licensing software for all the existing devs. But a lot of companies don't have high 3-4 digits worth of devs such that they can break off a team to work on support technology instead of core internal business apps or products.
    - hajile 4y ago
      No matter how you slice it, Java enterprise would only cost $180/yr which is almost 10x better than your best estimate Let's say you have 25 devs on a 5-year project. 5 of them are mobile focused, 5 are windows focused, 5 are mac/Linux focused, and 10 are focused on the cloud/server side of the project. We'll make the (probably bad) assumption that you don't need enterprise licenses for the desktop app portion. We'll further assume that windows devs use only windows and backend devs use only Linux while mobile and mac/Linux devs use both the systems they work on. First 2 years (because we get a discount on year 1 maintenance) $17,000 for 5 64-bit windows professional $51,000 for 10 64-bit linux enterprise $37,000 for 5 64-bit mac professional and 5 pairs of mobile for 2 years $34,000 for 5 64-bit mac professional and 5 64-bit linux professional $139,000 for first 2 years Next 3 years (maintenance and mobile annual fees) $11,250 for 5 64-bit windows professional $33,750 for 10 64-bit linux enterprise $41,250 for 5 64-bit mac professional and 5 pairs of mobile for 3 years $22,500 for 5 64-bit mac professional and 5 64-bit linux professional $108,750 for next 3 years $247,750 for project. Now let's do Java at $180/yr/dev. We'll even throw in IntelliJ Ultimate for 5 years. First 2 years $9,000 - 25 devs for 2 years of enterprise Java $14,975 - 25 devs for year 1 of IntelliJ Ultimate ($599/yr/dev) $11,975 - 25 devs for year 2 of IntelliJ Ultimate ($479/yr/dev) $35,950 for first 2 years next 3 years $13,500 - 25 devs for 3 years of enterprise Java $8,975 - 25 devs for year 3-5 of IntelliJ Ultimate ($359/yr/dev) $22,475 for next 3 years $58,425 for project Drop the non-enterprise devs from support reduces Java cost from $22,500 to just $9,000. Dropping subsequent years of the new IntelliJ would cut that cost from $35,925 down to $14,975 reducing our total expenses to just $23,975. I'd calculate these for LispWorks, but they don't even provide that option at all. If you forego maintenance entirely, you're still stuck with $115,000 the first year and $40,000 for the remaining 4 years of subscription to mobile meaning your absolute minimum here is $155,000 and exceeds even the top-end budget for a Java project. If you turn out to need the Enterprise version for the non-backend devs and want maintenance, that cost goes up to $267,875. The difference in money is enough to provide every team member with a new $4,000 laptop year 2 and again year 4 OR to increase their yearly bonus by $1600.
lispm 4y ago
> I would like to be able to really evaluate the product before spending a significant amount of money on it, but with the limits of the personal edition, it immediately quit on the first attempt of starting my back-then tiny hobby project. Usually one contacts the vendor and asks for a time-limited full version of the product for evaluation. > On the other side, with SBCL I have a really strong Lisp implementation. That's one of the advantages of a language standard with multiple competing / complementing implementations.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  > Usually one contacts the vendor and asks for a time-limited full version of the product for evaluation. Yes, if there is already the deep desire to acquire Lispworks, this would be the way to go. But I never arrived at that point. It is also a bit odd to have a personal edition which supposedly is usable for evaluation, but it really isn't. As I said before, I might not be their target customer, but on the other side, my experiences might be more common, so I am presenting them here.

by _ph_ 4y ago

kgwgk 4y ago

> As an enthusiast, I would be happy to spend a few hundred € for private usage, but not thousands. Note that the cost for private usage starts at a few hundred €. You only get to "thousands" if you include multiple platforms or several support incidents.

_ph_ 4y ago
Well, it starts at €480 (Linux) - €720 for the Mac for a pure IDE, without the ability to produce executables. You are limited to run your programs inside the development environment, this limits its applicability a lot. You can't write a simple command line utility this way, just to name one example. You cannot give it to a friend etc. The HobbyistDV edition is in my eyes the first really usable one. It is already over €1400, and that is for a single OS, a single CPU architecture. Especially as a hobbyist I might be able to play around with it a bit. I would be interested if there is any customer who has more than one hobbyistDV license. And that doesn't seem to include any updates.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  > The HobbyistDV edition is in my eyes the first really usable one. It is already over €1400 Less than 1000 if you can live with 32 bits but I wonder if someone goes for that option nowadays. > and that is for a single OS, a single CPU architecture. The MacOS version supports both Apple Silicon and Intel.
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    > Less than 1000 if you can live with 32 bits but I wonder if someone goes for that option nowadays. Right. I don't count the 32 Bit versions as serious contenders. > The MacOS version supports both Apple Silicon and Intel. That is good news. For pure Mac users this is interesting, still very expensive. Personally, my development time is split between MacOS and Linux.
  - louis771 4y ago
    The macOS version is not available as 32-bit edition so it is twice as expensive as the cheapest 32-bit version. Also, you are not allowed to give a saved image away / cannot run it without the licensed LispWorks installation.
    - kgwgk 4y ago
      > Also, you are not allowed to give a saved image away / cannot run it without the licensed LispWorks installation. I think you're not talking now about the HobbyistDV version mentioned in the parent comment, are you?
    - lispm 4y ago
      macOS itself is no longer available as 32-bit edition, but as 64bit versions on two processor platforms.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  By the way, this is not completely correct: > You are limited to run your programs inside the development environment, this limits its applicability a lot. You can't write a simple command line utility this way, just to name one example. You can save and run a console-only image which doesn't start the graphical IDE.
hajile 4y ago
Professional starts at $1500 for the 32-bit edition. That price doubles for 64-bit. Need to connect to a database and use their ORM? That’s another $1500. Want to do a cross platform mobile app? Add another $2000. Need windows and Mac? That’s another $4500 for each. A cross platform app would cost $15,500 PER DEVELOPER. I work for a fortune 500 company and they’d just say no at those prices. It’s an absolute no go for regular companies.
- Avshalom 4y ago
  Okay but why would you do that in a large company, you don't need every single developer triple booting. You've got 150 people and 25 of are RHEL, 25 are macos and 100 are windows. and also the 5k license is a one time fee. over the course of say 5 years its 5100 [first two years] + (1125 * 3) [next three] = 1695 a year [asymptotically approaching 1125] if you want to target both mobile runtimes + (5 * 2000)[the mobile runtimes *are* annual although as with desktop you wouldn't actually need everyone to have both, or either] = 3695 a year [asymptotically approaching 3125] That's before any volume discount (I dunno lispworks but as a point of comparison Sicstus goes from 2550/seat to 1510/seat for just 20 seats) and unlike say Dyalog, distribution is free so only the devs need licenses not any one else in the org. I'm not saying it's cheap mind you but even at 3700 a year * 100 devs, if your bumping up against sharp edges in SBCL: 370000 only gets you 1-2 devs to work on those edges. At the size of a Google adding developers works out to be cheaper than licensing software for all the existing devs. But a lot of companies don't have high 3-4 digits worth of devs such that they can break off a team to work on support technology instead of core internal business apps or products.
  - hajile 4y ago
    No matter how you slice it, Java enterprise would only cost $180/yr which is almost 10x better than your best estimate Let's say you have 25 devs on a 5-year project. 5 of them are mobile focused, 5 are windows focused, 5 are mac/Linux focused, and 10 are focused on the cloud/server side of the project. We'll make the (probably bad) assumption that you don't need enterprise licenses for the desktop app portion. We'll further assume that windows devs use only windows and backend devs use only Linux while mobile and mac/Linux devs use both the systems they work on. First 2 years (because we get a discount on year 1 maintenance) $17,000 for 5 64-bit windows professional $51,000 for 10 64-bit linux enterprise $37,000 for 5 64-bit mac professional and 5 pairs of mobile for 2 years $34,000 for 5 64-bit mac professional and 5 64-bit linux professional $139,000 for first 2 years Next 3 years (maintenance and mobile annual fees) $11,250 for 5 64-bit windows professional $33,750 for 10 64-bit linux enterprise $41,250 for 5 64-bit mac professional and 5 pairs of mobile for 3 years $22,500 for 5 64-bit mac professional and 5 64-bit linux professional $108,750 for next 3 years $247,750 for project. Now let's do Java at $180/yr/dev. We'll even throw in IntelliJ Ultimate for 5 years. First 2 years $9,000 - 25 devs for 2 years of enterprise Java $14,975 - 25 devs for year 1 of IntelliJ Ultimate ($599/yr/dev) $11,975 - 25 devs for year 2 of IntelliJ Ultimate ($479/yr/dev) $35,950 for first 2 years next 3 years $13,500 - 25 devs for 3 years of enterprise Java $8,975 - 25 devs for year 3-5 of IntelliJ Ultimate ($359/yr/dev) $22,475 for next 3 years $58,425 for project Drop the non-enterprise devs from support reduces Java cost from $22,500 to just $9,000. Dropping subsequent years of the new IntelliJ would cut that cost from $35,925 down to $14,975 reducing our total expenses to just $23,975. I'd calculate these for LispWorks, but they don't even provide that option at all. If you forego maintenance entirely, you're still stuck with $115,000 the first year and $40,000 for the remaining 4 years of subscription to mobile meaning your absolute minimum here is $155,000 and exceeds even the top-end budget for a Java project. If you turn out to need the Enterprise version for the non-backend devs and want maintenance, that cost goes up to $267,875. The difference in money is enough to provide every team member with a new $4,000 laptop year 2 and again year 4 OR to increase their yearly bonus by $1600.

lispm 4y ago

> I would like to be able to really evaluate the product before spending a significant amount of money on it, but with the limits of the personal edition, it immediately quit on the first attempt of starting my back-then tiny hobby project. Usually one contacts the vendor and asks for a time-limited full version of the product for evaluation. > On the other side, with SBCL I have a really strong Lisp implementation. That's one of the advantages of a language standard with multiple competing / complementing implementations.

_ph_ 4y ago
> Usually one contacts the vendor and asks for a time-limited full version of the product for evaluation. Yes, if there is already the deep desire to acquire Lispworks, this would be the way to go. But I never arrived at that point. It is also a bit odd to have a personal edition which supposedly is usable for evaluation, but it really isn't. As I said before, I might not be their target customer, but on the other side, my experiences might be more common, so I am presenting them here.