Comment by narag
18 years ago
>So what? Lots of software gets written without ever touching Windows.
Except most people doesn't want to write "lots of software", but software that fills certain requirements, often customers' requirements: run on Windows, do threads, have a rich GUI, minimize to tray, detect screensaver, interface to word processor, customer's database, customer's crappy ERP, etc.
>the amount of stuff you need to know to start working with Java is pretty darn daunting as well,
I've done both starts (Java and Lisp) and I can't disagree more.
>But I think commercial, professional work is possible right now given the state of SBCL.
It depends on your requirements. For some environments that's not true at all.
> It depends on your requirements. For some environments that's not true at all.
Which is true of nearly every commerical software environment out there. Why does Lisp get such a brutal grading compared to something like MS's CLR or Cocoa? Those are definitely commercially viable platforms that also don't meet these requirements.
Huge APIs. Specially GUI. Big community. Many tools.
Did I say GUI? GUI. GUI. GUI. Web apps are nice, free you from slavery, all that. But for a lot of tasks there is no other practical option than desktop apps, and that's what a lot of people use, even if they don't write blogs or appear in hip news, so they're invisible.
So there are no GUI frameworks on common-lisp.net/projects? And suddenly SWIG doesn't bind to CFFI?
I appreciate your concern, but you seem somewhat ignorant to the number and quality of software libraries available to most common lisp implementations. There are excellent GTK bindings and Objective-C bindings. I'm not sure about what's available on the Windows site (although I guess I should learn, given the events of this week).
And as for the community, you have me there. The Lisp community is indeed fractured and weird. But, uh, at the end of the day I think this is a wash. People do great things in unusual languages all the time. It's not like EngineYard or I have a massive Erlang community bolstering our efforts on Fuzed and Vertebra, but we're making progress and doing what I consider to be good work.