CL is the perfect language for those who consider that development is not a social activity, and luckily for you, there are a couple of niches where this remains a sustainable delusion. For now. Meanwhile, Clojure carries on the Lisp heritage in the branch of software development that's not going to get extinct soon.

Create a simple working installer for the major OS's that includes a useful IDE, Database connectivity to least one major database and a fully functional web server. Once this is working get some people to write a standard library for date / time functions, file IO, formatting output etc.

Never underestimate how difficult it is for a new user to setup a working environment.

http://www.newartisans.com/blog/ready-lisp.html

It's Aquamacs combined with SBCL, some documentation, and some should-be-standard CL libraries. Double click and it immediately takes you into a REPL. Aquamacs recognizes most of the usual Mac key bindings, making the Emacs curve not quite so steep.

I've tried SBCL with the Eclipse plugin and it's been a huge PITA. IIRC, I couldn't get libraries to install when I finally gave up. It may have improved since, but I'm not sure. Of course the fact that many cool-sounding CL libraries had defunct websites and inaccessible CVS repos didn't exactly encourage me...

I'm just learning and my conclusion (by elimination :-)) is that for Windows the best is to use Emacs + SLIME + SBCL. There is an installation guide here: http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/04/09/sbcl-emacs-windows-v...

In the comments there are instructions to get ASDF working, that I haven't tried yet.

I've tried to avoid Emacs, but it seems impossible. Lisp in a Box has a lot of problems, ABLE has still too many bugs and Corman lacks GUI programming without which I can't justify the price. CUSP also has too many bugs. So I'm surrendering and looking at Emacs.

For the web server part, just use good old CGIs.

I started by writing a domain-specific crawler which extracted certain information from a bunch of sites. But the sites I was crawling changed their design mid way. So I then ended up writing a program in CL, to which I describe the data that the site has. E.g. Name-of-city is "Edinburgh", Address is '15 Market Place, ED12', First-Movie-name is 'Bend it like Beckham', First-showing-date is '15 Jan', First-showing-time is '14:20'. The program then produces a function which when give a page from this website extracts this information in the form of an alist so that it can be pushed into the database.

Funnily enough the my site which shows this data runs on django.

I did, and so did this author.

So who's anecdote wins?

"The biggest trouble that plagued us was that we could never quite get Lisp reddit stable enough to sleep at night. There were weird threading issues that would bring the site to its knees a couple times a day and required constant monitoring."

You can read more of it in this blog entry.

http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2005/12/reddit-and-lisp-psyc...

Edit: Corrected :-)

But of course that's not of much interest to the average user. I think SBCL is in general faster, is developed more actively, has more features that are relevant in the modern world (eg. lose a Motif interface, gain native threads), and currently runs on more platforms than CMUCL does.

My impression is that most people using CMUCL are ones who started using it 10 years ago and are comfortable with it, new users would tend to go with SBCL. But I'm biased, so it's quite possible that there are real and substantial reasons to prefer CMUCL.

I was subscribed to SBCL list some months ago. I could see that Windows port was quickly progressing. "Never matured" suggest a project that was tried and later abandoned. It seems more of an ongoing effort. Versions are still being created regularly. I would try in a few months.

It's not necessarily a fault of SBCL, as much as it is a function of Java's popularity. But to say they equally share deployment problems seems a bit misguided to me.

However, it seems I've been living in a cave. Besides the Reddit case, I haven't heard (or at least can't remember) about problems running a CL environment. Can people who had this problem please reply - what disto, what implementation, what was the issue?

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/0450136edf...

The use case was a final class project, where the instructor needed to be able to run the final version of the program just by executing a script in an unpacked tar file. Couldn't get SBCL to run with the limited time I spent on it. Got CMUCL to run, but not in a way that could be deployed in a self installing manner. Punted and used Java (was easier to work with team members that way, too).

Clojure would have been perfect.