Why I like Common Lisp
This article illustrates one of the hurdles the Common Lisp community often sets before itself when it produces a piece of marketing. It points to resources that are not immediately obtained or that don't directly touch on the large subjects mentioned.<p>For example, one of the important capabilities mentioned in the article is getting close to the metal with profilers and hand tuning code and the runtime environment. Yet none of the links discuss this directly or provide tutorials.<p>The discussion about the wonders of CLOS suggests reading <i>The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol</i> - a $35.00 345 page dead tree tome which Amazon will get to you in about a week if you opt for free shipping. Graham's <i>Ansi Common Lisp</i> is of course even more obscure - it's been out of print for years and from Amazon you're in the realm of individual sellers [my anecdote is that it took about a month to get the copy I ordered - the seller was a nice person but it was a couple of weeks before they read their email from Amazon letting them know someone had purchased their copy].<p>The author goes on to recommend LispWorks as a platform. It's $1500 for 32 bits in North America and $4500 if you want to use all 64bits that your OS probably runs under. Sure there's a free version, it's 32-bits, not licensed for commercial work, and crippled. Don't get me wrong, the free version is probably fine for playing around with, but this article targets people for whom tuning the heap and GC are appealing, and this tends to be a professional rather than hobbyist market segment.<p>The "early Web 1.0" vibe is unfortunately common when the Common Lisp community attempts to promote Common Lisp. Let's face it, the linked Lisperati site looks a GeoCities page [a good one]. The LispWorks page requires four clicks to get to the price of non-crippleware. The author's own guide links to academic papers and black and blue on white websites.<p>The issue is that the Common Lisp Community is not just sending signals that most of the potential market ignores, it's that it is sending signals that turn the potential market off. I will unequivocally say that crippleware is no longer a viable approach to achieving significant developer mindshare. The landscape is open source and $4500 a seat [and calling it Enterprise Edition] is only going to hit some [potentially profitable] edge cases.<p>Of all the places accessible from the author's post, the only one that looks in touch with the present is the original article on BlogSpot. Everything else screams "This ain't for you" at most people.<p>It makes Racket look hip. And that's hard to do.