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Personally, I think the problem is that CommonLisp is just another programming language, whereas Lisp really shines when it provides a full-fledged programming environment. Nowadays, it would seem best to create such an environment on top of commodity hardware as a "virtual machine" that abstracts away from the hardware in a general, portable way. However, a good environment (1) needs a purpose, and (2) somebody needs to write it. Lisp currently fails on both points. The purpose used to be symbolic AI and NLP among other things. Nowadays it could be the same, or a web framework with integrated distributed computing and database, or scientific computing, or a server for certain business services, etc. There are many application domains for which a virtual "Lisp machine" would be beneficial but it needs to be developed for one of those real world applications, not just as a toy like existing attempts of building Lisp machines. And in my opinion the problem really is (2), developer power / size of the community. If you exclude super-expensive legacy Lisps, the current Lisp community doesn't even have a fully supported Lisp-native editor (portable Hemlock is not good enough) and also doesn't have good enough object persistence / native Lisp-based databases. Both are the foundations of any integrated Lisp machine. People sometimes claim CL+Emacs+Slime provides the full interactive experience. I just can't agree with that at all. I have tried, and the experience was not substantially different from Go development and development in any other fast-compiling language with Emacs. In some respects, it's even worse than with various modern languages, even though most of those languages are strictly inferior to CL from a pure language perspective. If editing files in Emacs is all there is to the allegedly great Lisp experience, and developers at the same time have to deal with all those idiosyncrasies of CL such as CL's filesystem path handling, ASDF, and tons of poorly documented libraries, then I can't really see the advantages of CL. The language is powerful, don't get me wrong, but a truly interactive experience is totally different. Smalltalk managed to keep this experience but for some reason the Lisp community seems too have lost this vision. I guess the developer community is just not large enough. Anyway, before someone tries to build another "close to metal" Lisp machine or tries to revive any old Lisp machine, I'd rather wish the community would focus on creating truly integrated development environments that abstract away from the host system and are fully hackable and editable from the ground up while maintaining security and multi-user access. A "virtual Lisp" machine with virtual OS, so to say. If that's developed for a certain purpose like building and deploying extremely portable web applications, I believe it can have a great future. Sorry for the long rant. This is just my impression after having programmed in various Lisp dialects for the past three decades. |
I think the (a?) reason for that is a (otherwise good) shift to production being immutable. When you aren't allowed to interact and change code in a running system, you lose a massive advantage of CL over simpler languages. When the answer to every error is "send a 4xx or 5xx to the client" then having a powerful error-handling system is similarly pointless. When you only write CRUD programs like everyone else, you're just plugging together other's libraries and not creating novel techniques or fancy math. In this world all CL's advantages are negated.