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by regularfry 4053 days ago
Exactly. Where's CL's Rails, or Eclipse, or Postgres?
1 comments
lispm 4053 days ago
Lisp's Eclipse is called GNU Emacs and it's free software. It comes with more than a million lines of Lisp code supporting all kinds of development tasks.
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regularfry 4052 days ago
It's also not Common Lisp. I get that emacs lisp is a pretty good example of a lisp, but I do find it interesting that the Lisp designed to be the widely-applicable industry standard hasn't seen something on the same level.
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lispm 4052 days ago
Emacs Lisp is closely related to Common Lisp. Both are coming from Maclisp. Emacs Lisp also contains lots of Common Lisp functionality.

Emacs Lisp also has extensive communication facilities with Common Lisp. See SLIME/Swank.

> but I do find it interesting that the Lisp designed to be the widely-applicable industry standard hasn't seen something on the same level.

There are also Clozure CL IDE, the LispWorks IDE or the Allegro CL IDE. All three are written in Common Lisp.

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regularfry 4050 days ago
> There are also Clozure CL IDE, the LispWorks IDE or the Allegro CL IDE. All three are written in Common Lisp.

So what's stopped these from getting to Emacs' level of popularity?

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lispm 4050 days ago
> So what's stopped these from getting to Emacs' level of popularity?

Emacs is not an editor. Emacs is a family of editors. You are probably talking about GNU Emacs.

They never tried and it would not make sense. GNU Emacs exists already and supports Lisp development very well. The other tools have concentrated on other things: GUI-based IDEs for Lisp.

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regularfry 4049 days ago
> Emacs is not an editor. Emacs is a family of editors. You are probably talking about GNU Emacs.

You tell me, you brought it up!

> They never tried and it would not make sense. GNU Emacs exists already and supports Lisp development very well. The other tools have concentrated on other things: GUI-based IDEs for Lisp.

Emacs is for more than Lisp development, though. It's not popular because you can do Lisp in it, it's popular because you can do everything in it. So we're back to my earlier question, which is why we haven't seen major, broad-based wins for Common Lisp, on the scale that we have for other languages.

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