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by randallsquared 4902 days ago
"it was never a goal in the Lisp community to develop a single unified or leading implementation"

...and that's one reason it hasn't ever achieved critical mass: it's so easy to write software that only works on one implementation that the various CLs effectively compete with each other on the same level that each is competing with other rapid development languages. It wasn't CL vs Python vs PHP, but instead CMUCL vs Python vs SBCL vs Lispworks vs PHP vs Allegro. Scheme has a similar problem. These are the problems that come from having a standard instead of a canonical implementation, in my opinion. Canonical implementations promote growth in a way that a standard for a language doesn't.
2 comments
lispm 4902 days ago
Yeah, and Python competes against Ruby against Perl against Javascript against Python 3 against Perl 6. Without sharing any code. And you win almost nothing. CPython, Perl, Ruby, ... are all slow scripting languages. With the newest implementation, Ruby, being the slowest programming language of all.

CL implementations can share a lot of code.

I've just compiled Mark Tarver's Shen in another Lisp by just changing less than ten lines of code. It took me ten minutes.

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spacemanaki 4902 days ago
I've struggled with various Scheme programs not working in different implementations (mostly code from books like Lisp in Small Pieces) and have heard plenty about the fragmented Scheme landscape, but is this really such a big problem with Common Lisp? And is/was that really a big reason why Lisp has failed to catch on? (being genuine here, I have no idea really about the history and have only use CL a bit)

It seems to me that there are plenty of more popular languages with a similar glut of implementations: there are multiple JVM vendors, multiple implementations of Java (Sun/Oracle and now Dalvik, ...), many C and C++ compilers, etc...

This is total speculation, but it is perhaps because things like threads and networking were not part of the Common Lisp standard that there are fragmentation issues that impeded adoption? Or do you still think that canonical implementation vs language standard is that much better, in almost all cases?

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