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Lisp's age is not an issue. The fact that the Common Lisp standardization process happened prematurely and effectively killed the language is a problem.


I've not heard of that. Can you provide more info on how/why the standardization process happened prematurely?


I think he's referring to how the standard says nothing about threads and GUIs and sockets and other crucial features. (But I think other standards like C don't even say anything about that either...)

But most implementations address those issues and there are even libraries that expose those features in a uniform way across implementations.


So, the solution is a Lisp'09 standard that talks about GUIs, threads and sockets?

I guess the really big problem probably is that there is no canonical implementation, no obvious way to go like there is for other languages. When you want to play with Java, you grab NetBeans or Eclipse and you have Sun to turn to for a runtime. When you want to play with Ruby or Python or most newer languages, you go to http://{$language}.org.

Smalltalk suffers from the same problem - too many different implementations, and no obvious path to follow.


Just use SBCL. Problem solved. It's a great implementation with a big following among Lispers.


It took me a while to get to that decision.




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