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LISP Ecosystems
I criticized Allegro yesterday at Between the Lines for a business model that sells programming language development environments like they were enterprise software. Programming languages and their development environments are free in the 21st century—at least that’s how most people think about them. I can’t imagine approaching a VC, for example, with a business plan that has as it’s basis selling programming language tools.
The problem is that programming languages depend on complex ecosystems of libraries, IDEs, testing tools, Web components, and so on. A reader at BTL said it in this way:
Where’s the ecosystem?
LISP was born in 1958… but where’s the ecosystem of tools and libraries—FOSS and commercial—that surrounds C++, Java Perl, Python, PHP and even the .NET platform? Ruby dovumentation and libraries are so much easier to come by and that language was born in the mid-90s.
Looks like LISP’s fans have a lot of work to do if they want to bridge the support gap with competing languages and platforms. Until that happens, LISP will be like Latin—historically significant but otherwise dead.
There actually is a community of people who use LISP, but it’s not as big as it could be. Several factors contribute to this:
Common Lisp isn’t all that common. That is, the CL spec covers the language, but not much else. Transferring programs is hard. This contrasts sharply with new languages like PHP, Python, and Ruby where the core language and libraries are free so there’s only one implementation. Consequently, developers create large bodies of code that can be easily used by anyone else.
Posted by windley on February 10, 2006 7:41 AM
Comment from Levi at February 12, 2006 11:57 PM
I think you're way off-base here. Allegro is but one of several commercial Common Lisp providers, and there are also several quality Open Source implementations that are competitive with the commercial ones. There are lots of libraries that are portable between most, if not all of them. The situation, in this regard, is certainly a lot better than it is with Scheme!
I guess, since you said the trial version wasn't sufficient for you, that what you /really/ want to check out is AllegroCache and other nifty Allegro value-adds, not Common Lisp. As one of the BTL commenters attested, you could easily have gotten a quote by replying to their email. From reading comp.lang.lisp, I get the impression that Allegro will go out of their way to tailor the cost of their product to suit your needs (sometimes providing it for nearly no cost), and that they also give excellent support. I'm not sure why you feel these sorts of things aren't worth some amount of money, or why you assume their prices are steep just because they are not visible on their web page.
Anyway, there are a number of other interesting Lisp-things you might want to check out if you're not going to reply to Allegro and get a quote. SBCL and OpenMCL are (arguably) the best free Lisps for x86 and PPC, respectively. SLIME is an incredibly cool free IDE for Lisp written in Emacs. Elephant, CLSQL, cl-prevalence, cl-store, and BKNR-datastore all tackle the problem of persisting Lisp objects, each in a somewhat different way. UnCommonWeb is an interesting web framework that includes an interpreter with support for call/cc to handle continuation-based web programming. There's cl-ppcre, a perl-compatible regex library that's faster than perl, in many cases. There's asdf, a system definition facility (sort of like make), and asdf-install, which will automatically download packages for you. There's cl-typesetting, which produces PDFs. There's an entire, high-quality tutorial-style book available online for free (Practical Common Lisp) that includes source for a unit test framework, an id3-tag parser, a shoutcast server, and some great web tools. There's a group, the cl-gardeners, that are actively working to make things more newbie-friendly.
I think, if you had taken a more exhaustive survey of actual current Lisp ecosystems rather than giving a knee-jerk reaction to a particular Lisp vendor's quoting process, you might have posted something rather different.
Comment from Harry Fuecks at February 21, 2006 2:05 PM
"the core language and libraries are free"
That's the crux of it. As a complete LISP beginner, been enjoying Practical Common Lisp (APress) but the immediate sore thumb was discovering that there seems to be no serious and Free Windows implementation.
That immediately put LISP in a category of "interesting learning but never going to use it in reality" because if I write any LISP, I'll basically only be amusing myself with it on *Nix.