| I can't express how much I agree with everything you say. Often, I've wondered if Lisp attracts, due to it power and flexibility, a certain type of "lone hacker" who builds amazing but unscalable ivory towers of abstractions. One example of this, often mentioned as a success, but which I consider a failure if you take the longer view, is Naughty Dog using Lisp to develop their game engine compiler and such. This was so specialized that their new owner Sony balked and made them use standard tools. Alternately, you could say that Lisp does exactly what it was meant to do: enable single and small teams of developers to engage in very productive exploratory programming. Carl Hewitt once told me that back in the heyday of Lisp (the 80's) they believed general AI would be solved by small teams of developers. Current AI efforts are the total opposite. In this alternate interpretation, perhaps Common Lisp is simply not suited for large scale development or collaborations. Either due to language features or personality types. So maybe prototype in CL, then hire a few dozen Java devs to go to market. I'm not trying to be down on CL. I love it and have been developing my open-source 3D system in it. But man, I can't believe there isn't a single cross-platform GUI toolkit for CL! Or a decent open-source IDE. I guess we can do our small part and hope for the best. |