| > If it is so good why ain't it is used more? * Weird syntax (for most people). * No free implementations existed during a key period (80s, 90s) so no initial traction, no useful libraries and killer apps which would pull the whole ecosystem. Implementations didnt even exist for commodity hardware. * The commercial implementations cost too much, so they suffocated the ecosystem. People preferred coding for free in C or Perl, than paying an arm and a leg for Lisp. So they wrote all the useful libs in C, Perl, Java and Python instead of Lisp. * No canonical implementation, late and incomplete standardisation, which led to extreme fragmentation, which further killed off the growth of the ecosystem. Instead of writing useful libraries, Lispers wasted effort writing 1001 incompatible implementations of the same basic system. So to summarize, I'd say the Lisp ecosystem is _still_ suffering the consequences of the bad strategic decisions made 30-40 years ago. But it is slowly but steadily healing and improving, especially the last few years. It has a high-quality free implementation with SBCL [1], consolidated CPAN-like library management with Quicklisp [2] and a IDE with Emacs-based SLIME [3]. Everything is getting better. [1] http://www.sbcl.org/ [2] http://www.quicklisp.org/beta/ [3] http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/ |