Heavyweight support for corporate usecases is exactly what Lisp is missing right now. I would love for MS to pump out a Visual Scheme or TypeLisp. It’s the perfect scripting language for embedding in CLR Managed Code. Rather than bringing in something massive like C#.

Alas, I think MS saw the failure of Clojure within the Java ecosystem and foresaw the same if they made a similar effort.

What would TypeLisp or Visual Scheme provide that you can’t get from a repl and a language server integrated into your editor?

At work I write a lot of TypeScript. At how I write a lot of lisp. The lisp is absolutely more ergonomic and extensible.

A first-class IDE that doesn’t take six hours of fiddling and days of research to cobble together. Robust and well-maintained libraries for sockets, I/O, threading, and more. A corporate sponsor for corporations to be able to rely on when choosing to integrate Lisp into their .NET projects.

The ML crowd received F# and that’s practically the only reason anyone still uses anything ML-esque. I would like the same for Lisp. I know Rich Hickey tried to make Clojure for .NET first and failed, though, so I’m not holding my breath.

> first-class IDE

Atom/Pulsar, or Portacle (portable Emacs with SBCL + Quicklisp), or plain-common-lisp (2 clicks install for Windows), ALIVE for VSCode is getting there, also the newer Intellij plugin. And vim. LispWorks. Sublime, Lem, Jupyter notebooks, and more.

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...

Why do you consider Clojure a failure in the Java ecosystem?

MS only really wants runaway successes, not modest successes, particularly at the salaries required for the types of engineers to pull such a thing off. Clojure hasn’t attained runaway success in the corporate world and that’s even with the nearly flawless design and implementation Hickey executed. Even the branding is somehow more memorable than most languages.

Ah shit, right, it’s probably for the best lisp isn’t mainstream.