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Common Lisp had itself and its community to blame. Their dependency managers were decades behind other scripting languages. Poor defaults for build tooling. Even now building a statically-linked binary is an exercise in frustration.

Despite being an ANSI specified language, the most popular libraries focuses only on SBCL. CL is like Lua where most interpreters never achieve 100% compatibility with each other. The lack of Emacs/Vim alternatives demands beginners to adhere to their dogma. Adhering to their cargo cult might be reasonable if they are the dominant language and culture. But they are not. Software engineering classes in university teaches how to make Java AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBeans first and caml/lisp much later. Common lisp had it coming when they had their lunch eaten by Clojure. They were an old irrelevant relic that sat on their ivory tower and refused to improve or confront the status quo beyond empty words.

And it is not like the Common Lisp community lacks resources. They claim their language is used at Google via ITA software and in GOFAI through Grammarly. Even the bleeding edge of computing through Regetti. Then where are all the maintained, up to date tooling and libraries? Do a quick search and almost everything is unmaintained or half dead, with the usual generic excuse being "we are ANSI specified, libraries twenty years ago will work perfectly fine".

HN is an echo chamber for the greatness of Lisp where every commenter would worship at its church before going back to coding JS/Python/Java on Monday.



"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."

- Guy Steele, Java spec co-author


You forgot Scheme.




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