> All this said, Common Lisp (and Scheme, and it's implementations) have features that the general programming community is still rediscovering 30 years later.
A language is more than an accumulation of features. It doesn't matter how advanced an implementation is if it's not actually pleasant to program in.
> Dismissing it as something that sucks because the people involved didn't try hard enough is incredibly myopic.
I don't think anyone's saying they didn't try hard enough. But interop between CL and the rest of the world is undeniably poor - and this largely seems to be a deliberate choice by the CL community - and it's not much of a stretch to say that its unpopularity is a result of this.
I just think this whole argument is basically a straw man. Comparing something well specified that hasn't changed is 30 years to an entire class of hand wavy 'better languages' isn't an apples to apples comparison, and is, frankly, a dumb waste of time.
Yeah, but that would be bullshit to assume. I use for example LispWorks (commercial, proprietary) and Clozure CL (free, open source) on my Mac. Both have excellent interoperability with C and Unix. Both have a native Cocoa interface to the Mac.
Because CL is a language and not an implementation.
Many CL implementations have excellent interoperability capabilities.
Erh, no. You don't seem to have any historical insight into how common lisp came to be. (Or maybe you do have historical insight and are just being willfully ignorant).
It is a language designed by a set of companies and institutions compromising 25 years ago. Companies and institutions that had radically different operating systems and hardware, it wasn't a matter of writing software for a machine that ran either 'Windows or Unix.' You had to support the lisp machine vendors and a variety of mainframes/minicomputers. Emphasis on 'Common.' The theoretical possibility was that you could write a program on a MacIvory and then run it on your Symbolics Machine, ThinkingMachines machine, Unix Machine, Windows machine, PDP-11, Dandelion, DEC Alpha etc...
Go write a C (or Python for that matter) program that lets you access the file-system port-ably on a huge variety of operating systems using only the C standard. I suspect it will be difficult.
Anyway, you couldn't be any more wrong. You've limited the 'entire world' to essentially two similar platforms, one of which (Windows) isn't really that well supported.
The whole point is that it tried really, really hard to satisfy the entire lisp world, which included a number the larger players who were put out of business by Moore's law and cheap generic hardware rapidly outpacing expensive special purpose hardware.
All this said, Common Lisp (and Scheme, and it's implementations) have features that the general programming community is still rediscovering 30 years later. Dismissing it as something that sucks because the people involved didn't try hard enough is incredibly myopic.
tl;dr: Nu-uh.