shop3 VS awesome-cl

A lot has gone wrong in terms of achieving high adoption, but specifically about something going wrong with rallying around CL, I don't think anything went wrong. No more are Maclisp, Interlisp, Lisp Machine Lisp, Zetalisp, Franz Lisp, Portable Standard Lisp, Spice Lisp... They were all slain or subsumed by Common Lisp. (You might have seen Franz elsewhere in this thread; rather than continuing it Franz, Inc. just developed Allegro Common Lisp separately. Spice Lisp meanwhile changed to become a CL implementation, became CMUCL, which was later forked into the now most popular implementation SBCL.)

Le Lisp/ISLisp are interesting European competition that didn't fall in line, but I don't ever hear about them, I only know they exist/existed, they might nowadays be effectively dead for all I know. Emacs Lisp is probably the biggest success in not caving to CL. Not big enough to constitute anything "going wrong" though.

I think your perception is wrong in two ways. First is the idea that Scheme and Clojure are somehow "variants" or "dialects" of Lisp. Scheme was never a Lisp dialect, it was instead described as a "Lisp-like". Also notice neither Scheme nor Clojure even have "Lisp" in their name, unlike all those other languages that got eaten by CL. "Lisp" meant something, and "Common Lisp" unified that meaning and I think deserves to be synonymous with "Lisp"; many writers have treated it that way. But Common Lispers are giving up that fight, because it's tiresome but also an understandable confusion not helped by Scheme or Clojure's attempts at capitalizing on some primordial idea about the good name of Lisp or whatever drives them to associate with the term. (#lisp in Freenode used to be only for Common Lisp, now in Libera #lisp is for all Lisp-likes and CL has its own channel.) Anyway, Scheme and Clojure have happily had their own evolution and separate largely incompatible s-expressions. I don't think their continued existence is a flaw against CL any more than another random programming language would be. One aspect of Clojure that might sting a little is that its entire reason for existing was because the author couldn't win political fights about having CL in production instead of the JVM.

The second way I disagree with your perspective is on prevalence. Scheme has had some success in teaching (mostly thanks to SICP) though Common Lisp was/is also used similarly at various places, however I think that's hurt [Common] Lisp more than anything. (Basically CL gets taught like Scheme, and so whether CL or Scheme is used students come away thinking they "know Lisp" without ever really having seen its OOP power, its handling of types, its condition system, its easy-to-define macros, let alone the trivial things like LOOP or SETF that make imperative programming possible and easy. It's like C++ classes that teach it as C-with-classes, but worse.) Scheme has also had success as GNU's official extension language (with Guile, which goes a ways beyond standard Scheme to be useful) and you see Scheme pop up in places like GIMP plugins. Racket is the most successful modern Scheme, but it has gone waaaay beyond standard Scheme and slowly seems to be becoming as large as CL. Real stuff is made with it, not just education stuff, but I'm less familiar with what's going on. It may yet eat CL's lunch.

Clojure of course has been a rising star and has enjoyed a lot of success in real stuff. It's popular, it's fashionable, and in terms of projects-per-second your perception is probably right that it's more widely used than CL right now. Where I would draw disagreement is in total pound-for-pound code that's Out There. CL has the benefit of decades of existence, so for example https://www.ptc.com/en/products/creo/elements-direct has been developed for a long time and is made of several million lines of CL code, and that's just one project. If you only used "active" (i.e. someone executed it over last month) code perhaps there's enough Clojure out there now to be an interesting race though there's no way to really tell; if you allow for all the CL that has been written and is no longer run, I don't think there's any contest, CL has such a rich history. (A random application being Mirai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(software) with demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IRsYGfr4jo -- has there ever been a 3D modeling program written in Clojure? Will there ever be?)

https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies is an ongoing collection of companies known to be using CL. In terms of "industries", right now quantum computing companies seem particularly drawn to CL. Symbolic math historically also, with Maxima and Axiom being modern still-working/developed code bases. (The latter is a million lines of literate CL.)

But drawing on legacy again rather than last-few-years stuff, an old quote by Kent Pitman seems relevant: "Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list." We can of course add more things to the list if that would help, like Mars Rovers or video games, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9510945 has a few more, in recent news I learned about https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/osnsgz/intels_... and https://github.com/shop-planner/shop3 was open-sourced in 2019. Lisp is in a lot of places all over the world (it's had quite a legacy in Japan even), but not the most fashionable stuff, so it's also understandable that many people haven't heard about it, realized they're using it, or heard people talking about it.

here's an example from the shop3 planner which implements the macro's behavior in its expansion, rather than as a call-with- function:

I know you're not asking for recommendations, but Lisp, particularly SBCL, really seems to check all your boxes. I say this as someone who generally reaches for Scheme when it comes to Lisps too.

There are a few game engines[0] for CL, but most of them seem to be catered specifically to 2D games.

[0] https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Hello, a single counter-example I hope https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...

(see more from https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl?tab=readme-ov-fil...

https://cl-community-spec.github.io/pages/index.html

and some more)

Everyone, if you don't have a clue on how's Common Lisp going these days, I suggest:

https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/these-years-in-common-li... (https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/107oejk/these_years_i...)

A curated list of libraries: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl

Some companies, the ones we hear about: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

and oh, some more editors besides Emacs or Vim: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... (Atom/Pulsar support is good, VSCode support less so, Jetbrains one getting good, Lem is a modern Emacsy built in CL, Jupyter notebooks, cl-repl for a terminal REPL, etc)

check out the editor section, there's more than Emacs these days: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...

- https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl for libraries

- https://www.classcentral.com/report/best-lisp-courses/#ancho...

- a recent overview of the ecosystem: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/these-years-in-common-li... (shameless plug, on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321090)

More HTML generators for CL: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#html-generators-a... there are lispy ones (Spinneret), Django-like ones (Djula, I like it, easy to use and extend), HTML-based allowing for inline Lisp code (Ten), JSX-like ones (lsx, markup), and more.

https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl is usually a good place to find recommendations. Jzon is pretty good.

> obstacles add up

I actually agree. It wasn't smooth for me to ship my first CL app. It's all better now (more tools, more documentation, more blog posts from several people, more SO questions and answers!).

> performant

SBCL is in the same ballpack of C, Rust or Java in many benchmarks.

In this article series, the author writes the same program in CL, Rust and Java. In fact, he copy-pastes a PG snippet from 30 years ago. This snippet beats Rust and Java in LOC and speed. But, yeah, he wasn't writing super efficient Rust code, so after many discussions, pull requests and sweating, the Rust code became the most performant. https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-... It didn't take work to make the CL code performant, more so for the Rust one ;)

a benchmark after sb-simd vectorization: https://preview.redd.it/vn5juu36v2681.png?width=715&format=p... (https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/riedio/quite_a...)

> good tools for networking, for writing concurrent or asynchronous code, for graphics,

I refer the reader to https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl but yes, CL won't have the best libraries in some scenarii (GUI? Tk libs are good, we have Gtk4, a Qt5 library used in production© by a big player but difficult to install etc)

> it doesn't give you a good package manager or means of distributing code

Quicklisp is neat, with limitations, that can be addressed with Qlot, ql-https, or CLPM or the newest ocicl.

It's a good book!

Modern companions would be:

- the Cookbook: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ (check out the editors section: Atom/Pulsar, VSCode, Sublime, Jetbrains, Lem...)

- https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl to find libraries

Also:

- https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321090 2022 in review

> static strong typing

Alright, here is it: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/

> small efficient native binaries

The numbers are: with SBCL's core-compression, a web app with dozens on dependencies will weight ±30 to 40MB. This includes the compiler, the debugger, etc. Without core compression, we reach ±150MB.

> The actor runtime?

the actor library: https://github.com/mdbergmann/cl-gserver

> couldn't find a way to make money with it. I suspect many other programmers are in my boat.

Alright. Some do, that's life. Yes, some companies go with CL even in 2023 (https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/lisp-interview-kina/, they released https://github.com/KinaKnowledge/juno-lang lately; Feetr (finance): https://twitter.com/feetr_io/status/1587182923911991303)

https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

> Give us an HTTP (1.x & 2.0) and WebSockets libraries

How so? We have those libraries. HTTP/2: https://github.com/zellerin/http2/

https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl

https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp -- this one is great, and the first thing I recommend

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ -- also great and up to date

https://awesome-cl.com/ -- for anything else.