So we say the language is terrible because the world around it changed? Using Common Lisp may be inconvenient because the standard is out of date, that doesn't mean the design (or language) was a failure in a historical sense.
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.
I'm less interested in questions like "how much credit do the original designers of CL deserve?" and more interested in "what languages should I consider for my new project?". Is Dylan a viable option? If not, why not? "It's not because it inherits common lisp's non-interoperability" is then an interesting point.
Re:Dylan: the harsh realities of the market
by lispm on Wednesday August 27, 2014 @05:53AM
(#8231412)
> inherits common lisp's non-interoperability
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.
> 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.