That's cool, but I think they should really be working on a clojure IDE. It's the only Lisp that seems to be going anywhere.

Yes, abandon something that's been making money for 30 years and throw away decades of domain expertise because it's not fashionable. Great idea.

Not that clojure is a bad language(I actually like it quite a bit), but compared to the professional common lisp world, it's a baby. CL has an extremely high-quality and stable specification, dozens of very good implementations for pretty much every platform(whit several ones that are decades old, and several ones that are brand new), a community that simply refuses to die, and use cases where clojure would be completely inadequate. Not to mention the assertion that non-clojure lisps are not going anywhere is completely false, both common lisp and racket(hell, even elisp) are growing in their niches and developing their ecosystems. Books and libraries are being written, products are being developed, conferences and meetups are organized, businesses are started and research is being done.

themartorana

With zero snark, because I've never had the (apparent) pleasure of working with a lisp, what are the use cases for Common Lisp? It barely registers when talking about building APIs and production cloud platforms for game services, which is my current wheelhouse. Clojure comes up, of course...

pavelludiq

Specific domains where clojure might not do so well are probably the same domains where the JVM is impractical, for example embedded or low-level programming, anything where you have to interact heavily with the world outside of the JVM and have a small footprint.

Obviously mobile looks like an area where common lisp has better options(with this announcement that makes two commercial implementations, the other one being mocl: https://wukix.com/mocl).

How about crazy experimental operating systems? https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

If you want to write native(non-swing) guis LispWorks has that covered, and the open source gtk/qt bindings, while a bit unlispy work very well. Racket has a pretty cool framework too.

There is also the fact that a lot of programmers, rationally, or irrationally, simply dislike the JVM. Pretty much everything I dislike about clojure has more to do with the JVM than the core design itself.

Both lispworks and franz maintain success lists, so you can look at some of these projects if you want to see some areas where lisp has done fine:

http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html http://franz.com/success/