[cperkins]

I read the article and thought a lot about it, but I'm not buying it. The acceptance problems for Lisp haven't been because it is "too powerful" or that lone wolf hackers won't work together.

The author makes an example of the many Object Oriented (OO) systems, but he performs some bait-and-switch there. Those many OO systems were for _Scheme_, not Common Lisp. And Scheme is intentionally a tiny Lisp. For a long time, Scheme was focused on being the smallest possible Lisp. Common Lisp on the other hand, while it briefly went through an OO experimentation period, really only has one OO system: CLOS.

Also, the whole Emacs line is off target too. What has that to do with the expressive power of the language? And why ignore the two extremely powerful commercial Common Lisp IDE's out there? So is the point that Common Lisp isn't successful because there isn't a better free IDE?

And the "lone wolf/80%" isn't doing it for me either. The Common Lisp specification was the work of many bright minds and is brilliant. And it stands in complete opposition to the situation the author attempts to describe.

I'm not saying that Lisp in general (Scheme, Common Lisp, and Clojure) has been successful, or that Common Lisp in particular has been. If the standard is mindshare and acceptance they have not been successful. There are histories and causes aplenty, but being too powerful is not one of them.