> Within that community it is not considered acceptable to say, "read this book and these five papers and drop a few thousand on commercial software, and then w

> Within that community it is not considered acceptable to say, "read this book and these five papers and drop a few thousand on commercial software, and then we might consider you worthy. You totally distort the Common Lisp community and you post FUD. You attack Charlotte's preferences for no reason. She presented HER preferences. Still you attack the Lisp community as if individual opinions are not allowed and as if she speaks for all. Chearlotte speaks for herself and I think her recommendations are good. There are a multitude free and open source implementations. Many were developed before stuff like Rails or Java even existed. Free and Open Source software has been written in Common Lisp from day one. Clozure CL, mentioned by Charlotte. It is published on the LLGPL. SBCL, mentioned by Charlotte. SBCL's roots go back to the early 80s as Spice Lisp and then CMU Common Lisp. Public Domain since 30+ years. And many others. Usually people complain the Common Lisp has too many implementations. Nobody required somebody to invest $4500 into a Lisp system to start. It's just that some people in the Lisp community use the commercial tools and think they are great. I'm one of those. LispWorks is probably the best implementation of a dynamic language anywhere. If people have actual problems with coding, they have multiple forums. I have personally answered 1000 Lisp questions on Stackoverflow. > analogy some members of the Common Lisp community often behave as if it's wrong for babies to babble Some non-members of the Common Lisp community seem to whine a bit too much for my taste. What the Common Lisp community (if there is one) does not really like is whiners who fail to contribute.