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Comment by phoe-krk | Hacker News Reader

Care to pay the author for an Allegro CL and/or LispWorks license so they can broaden their article?

Community licenses are available, I don't need to pay anything.

Lets assume the author shared his experience, rather then a comparison of features. Experience gained by actual usage. Those community licenses are severely restricted, to the point of being unattractive (to me and I suspect many others). I cannot be bothered to sign up and install crippleware when productive tools are available for free. LW might be best thing since sliced bread, but I'm afraid, I'll never know for sure.

And yet those community features offer a better graphical development experience, InteliJ of Lisp, so to speak.

They offer a more graphical development experience. Yes. Whether it is better than Slime, would need to be discussed. But the point is quite irrelevant in the moment, when you just cannot develop anything due to memory limitations.

I would think that one of their advantages is that they have GUIs more similar to what the underlying platform looks and feels. This is easier to learn and easier to use, compared to tools based on GNU Emacs, which is basically its own platform. There are a lot user interfaces in GNU Emacs which are not very user friendly and not so good looking.

Yeah, the Emacs UI is definitely a bit lacking. It could be greatly improved if they embraced Gtk a bit more. Especially if some widgets could be handled from elisp. But what it lacks in polish, it often makes up with usability, once you are a more advanced user. And of course, the sky is the limit for customizability.

I haven't used the recent versions of ACL and LW, so I cannot make a direct comparison, but for the experienced user, Emacs offers a lot of productivity.

If you ask for commitment before the pupil turns into a master, they will go elsewhere.

It escapes me, what this has to do with my comment. That was directed at the Emacs development in general. It is based on Gtk, but doesn't fully embrace it, still limiting itself to mostly a terminal emulation.

And severely limited at the same time, to the point where people, IMO understandably, prefer to use 100% free alternatives rather than write about the subpar experience available with "community licenses". Free versions of both LW and ACL have major hurdles that are getting in the way of developing software on these implementations.

That subpar experience is still better.

Not if your lisp image exits even with simple programs.

Perhaps you can write some articles using them, showing how they're better?

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