Some thoughts about raising the profile of Lisp
There exists a product that meets most of the suggestions in this article called LispWorks. It has an IDE runs on multiple platform and has the features that a majority of Lisp programmers would consider mandatory. There is a listener, editor, debugger, various browsers and more. You can deploy stand-alone binaries for the supported platforms. The user interface library uses native widgets for each platform. There are iOS and Android runtimes for core library code. There is FFI support for calling code outside of Lisp. LispWorks is a high-quality, professional product.<p>So what are the downsides? It isn&#x27;t open source and you have to pay for it. At some point developers decided that they wouldn&#x27;t pay for development tools. This has mostly been positive, but languages on the edges have suffered because of it. Yes, you can cobble something together using VSCode and various plugins, or use an Emacs environment. To me, the ergonomics of these solutions are inferior to an integrated solution like LispWorks and perhaps some of the other commercial Lisps I haven&#x27;t used.<p>Some of the examples the author mentions were also tightly integrated environments. If you ever used Dylan, or Self, of any of the other commercial Lisps that have come and gone over the years you can see the allure of an integrated IDE.<p>LispWorks has been almost magical for me. It was expensive, $3100 for the 64-bit IDE and another $1000 for the mobile runtime, but the ability to develop&#x2F;debug the core engine code in Lisp with the benefits of an integrated IDE, live code editing, REPL, etc. is more than worth it. The mobile products have native UI for the platform, but everything else is Lisp. You can most certainly develop and ship modern applications for desktop and mobile using LispWorks.