> Is this a troll, or did the author simply not do very much research?

It's not a troll, and I did do some research. I wrote this a few months ago (this is its second round on news.yc, and I'd make some addenda to it if it weren't actively linked to at the moment). My biggest problem was that I was insisting on portability across implementations, because that's something that I got for free in languages like Ruby that I didn't want to give up. Reading around, it looks like most Lisp users didn't have such a requirement, and mine was largely engineered because of bias given to me by the implementations of the other languages I was using.

When it comes down to it, I needed an implementation with those things that would work with FreeBSD, OS X, and Linux, and maybe sometimes Windows, and support threads, WebDAV, and some other stuff. While I still can't find a WebDAV client library, it looks like my requirements for portability across implementations may have been unfounded.

Since then I've gotten into Erlang, but if I were to try Lisp again it would probably be a Scheme after reading around.

Portability between implementations is a bit of a red herring (as you seem to have discovered); most libraries you'd actually want to use run on most implementations you'd actually want to use. Ruby and Python don't give you this either, but they do give you a standard implementation. I suspect a lot of Ruby code you might want to run doesn't work with JRuby or IronRuby.

Portability between operating systems is a more serious problem. I think ECL is the only free implementation that does this well, and most libraries don't seem to be tested on it.

>I suspect a lot of Ruby code you might want to run doesn't work with JRuby or IronRuby.

Not likely. Rails runs fine on jruby at least, and it does every dirty trick under the sun.

>When it comes down to it, I needed an implementation with those things that would work with FreeBSD, OS X, and Linux, and maybe sometimes Windows, and support threads, WebDAV, and some other stuff. While I still can't find a WebDAV client library, it looks like my requirements for portability across implementations may have been unfounded.

That kind of support is basically only provided by the JVM...unless I am mistaken.

Interesting. So if you could setting on say linux, then you probably would be good to go.

If you want support on another OS platform, run linux in a virtual machine of some sort.

The problem is, yes, there are libraries available for these things, but as far as I can tell they're not usually included or standardized. When I fire up Ruby or Python or whatever I know that most of the things I need are already there, and I don't usually have to go hunting down libraries all over the net.

There are just too many options for dialects, libraries, etc. I want one standard Lisp that has all the "expected" things built in so I can focus on programming.