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Comment by vindarel

17 hours ago

for folks looking for libraries: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl/

(I don't know for popularity but my personal opinion is that CL is still unmatched: this level of interactive development + good debugging tools + excellent implementation that compiles to fast machine code + fast startup for binaries + self-contained binaries + stable yet improving language, implementations and ecosystem + connect from a running program + commercial vendors if you need + … such a unique and productive set)

(re. the type system: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ for a Haskell on top of CL now)

If you look at awesome-cl you may surmise that Common Lisp has a bit of a dearth of libraries, but a glance at OCICL's repositories shows 79 pages worth of libraries, and Ultralisp even claims to have 2,170 projects. So while it's not at the level of C, Java, or Perl; it's nothing to be sneezed at either.

  • The fact is that it's so easy to write your own code in CL, that the majority of glue code in NPM, Maven and the likes don't make sense to be written.

    An example can be taken from a comparison between VS Code and Emacs. In the former, you have a whole browser engine and quite a bit of code to implement an editor on top of that. In the latter, you just have some primitive and the rest of it is LISP implementing multiple applications. LISP encourages less layers because the data structures and the language are so flexible.