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Comment by anta40 | Hacker News Reader

I assume you have some specific needs that couldn't be handled by open source Lisps like SBCL, CCL, etc?

No, his needs are probably better handled by Java or .NET or Go or whatever. And that's how Lisp atrophies. The complaint is a valid one.

Enterprise Java licenses are charged per developer seat, just saying.

Hasn't this just recently changed to per employee?

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3686611/oracle-per-employe...

$15/mo or $180/yr.

Lispworks for that same platform support would cost about $20,000 per dev the first year then a few thousand every year after.

You could buy 100 years of enterprise Java support for Jay one year of Lispworks.

The Java license costs per employee. Not per developer. That's an entirely different business model in a very different market for a very different tool.

It's a bit like claiming that your AMG Mercedes has a different pricing than a corporate car of a large fleet managed by a large rental company. That's trivially true, but you are comparing very different things.

Any company worth their salt doesn't pay for that, though. Heck, even stuffy enterprises like banks, who usually pay for everything, frequently don't do that.

The main JDK distros are big and stable enough to make this strategy viable in an enterprise environment.

Are there studies on the rate of project success comparing effort in A: JDK, .NET; and B: Go, Lisp at high status yacht racing sponsored by big names? There was a headline indicating failure is 68% all over in tech.

And, does paying for it more and more make a difference to success overall? Banks were leaving their terminals on overnight with bright white screens without powering them off which crypto entrepreneurs could have used the power for grinding out tokens.

> Are there studies on the rate of project success comparing effort in A: JDK, .NET; and B: Go, Lisp

No, there aren't and anyone saying otherwise is lying.

Almost all relevant data is tightly locked up in corporate software development silos (FAANG, enterprise middle ware, website or mobile dev shops, game devs, etc). The few studies that we have are limited to academic (basically toy projects) or OSS settings (and we don't really have the behind the scenes info from the corporate sponsors) and their sample sizes are pitiful.

Plus, what even is success? Adoption after 1 year? After 10 years (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...)?

What we can measure instead is the number of developers, jobs, projects started based on public announcements, etc.

And for that it's no contest. Java/C# >> Go >>>>>>> Lisp.

The reasons are less important than the facts on the ground.

Especially since Common Lisp was first proposed in 1982 (41 years ago), so a really long time ago. However, its rivals aren't spring chickens either, these days. Java was launched in 1995, 27 years ago (early Java devs are close to retirement, already), C# was launched in 2000, 23 years ago, heck, even Go was launched in 2019, that's 13 years ago.

So we're in a reality were we have multiple competing ecosystems that are big and developed and have been around for decades. So the mainstream ones will be major for a long time.

Oh wow so offering a paid tool when free ones are available is not the offense after all, as we are finding out!

I am also curious about this, what specific needs are better served by CL than Clojure or any Scheme / Racket?

Starting a CL project in 2023 seems risky to me given that most libraries are stagnant. I would love to be proven wrong.

Could it be that most of the critical libraries are stable? Can you give an example of a necessary library that is stagnant?

CLSQL, most graphics toolkits or lisp-stat.

for ORM people tend to use Mito. i think lisp-stat library is actually being developed. however one numerical cl library that doesnt get enough mention and is being constantly developed is petalisp for HPC

https://github.com/fukamachi/mito

https://lisp-stat.dev/

https://github.com/marcoheisig/Petalisp

Thanks for mentioning Mito, I had not seen that before. I used to rely on database migrations with Ruby’s ActiveRecord, it would be nice to have that for CL.

for my use case its just that the common lisp compilers, SBCL in particular, blow anything Clojure or Scheme/Racket has to offer. on the other hand the stability of the language should not be underestimated, but this is something you feel after years of use

on the other hand i think the common lisp development culture is very different to the black box library plug&play culture of other languages. if you find that you like to extend/personalise libraries it is a great language and i find the code to be much more comprehensible than the libraries from other languages i use. of course this is all a bit more demanding on the developer but for me the rewards are worth it

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