Comment by klibertp
Comment by klibertp 3 months ago
I tried using CL this year for a new version of my personal static site (blog) generator.
Yes, it's incredible and still an alien technology in some respects. Native AOT compilation at the level of functions with hot swapping - and without any ceremony, always available in the IDE - is one of them. As the OP writes at the end, only Smalltalk and Erlang come close.
But, when viewed objectively, in 2025 CL is quite behind in some aspects:
- Only one commercial IDE offers a true graphical debugger. Both SLIME and SLY (I'm not sure about stickers) fall behind JS or Python environments.
- Asynchronicity is based on explicit callbacks or callbacks wrapped in promises (and some macros). No async/await, no coroutines. Since writing async code is harder, people default to sequential code and a thread pool. For IO-bound apps, this unnecessarily adds synchronization problems that would be mostly avoided in single-threaded concurrency.
- Tiny ecosystem of libraries. Due to the stability (or stagnation) of the language, a lot of old code still works, but even with this, finding what you need on Quicklisp can be challenging.
- The stdlib is old, crufty, and quirky. It's also very small by today's "batteries included" standards. Initiatives like CL21 or CIEL try to alleviate this somewhat.
- Even in SBCL, the type system is limited compared to MyPy, TypeScript, or TypedRacket.
- Bolting packages (module system) on top of symbols leads to some problems in practice.
- The progress in CL development is severely hampered by the set-in-stone standard, small pool of users, and the need to reconcile 10 different implementations.
It's still a nice tool for many uses, and the interactive development is indeed comfortable and productive. Still, if nothing significant happens, I don't think CL will have a chance to gain popularity again. Up until now, a successor language was hard to justify - despite some shortcomings, CL was still a language from the future. Now that future is largely here already, so the shortcomings become more and more glaring. There's SICL, but it'll take another decade (if at all) before we can expect results from that.
I'm now looking at Jank and Gerbil with some expectations, though I think I'll stick with CL in my current project.
It's funny but I think your exact comment could have been written 10 years ago, substituting 2025 with 2015. Some things might be ±2 years. This observation could be seen as both a positive and a negative about both the language and people writing about it.
Things have changed since 2015, though, and in 2015 looking back at 2005 things had changed too. (Quicklisp was only on the scene in 2010, which is somewhat late compared to its equivalents in other languages.) Popularity-wise, I continue to be positive about CL's global future, even if nothing is done about your bullet points. Over the years I keep noticing new software, new implementation features, the occasional new book, new papers, new jobs, and new people writing stuff, I expect that to continue. Some long-standing companies and systems are still going, avoiding the death of a total rewrite or just better competition, some of them like managing train schedules are older than me. It looks like a living and (slowly) growing ecosystem. It won't ever again enjoy a top-10 language status by making technical changes, but I don't think many people care. (There's a similar level of not caring when it comes to non-GC languages and how their overall job market share is probably not going to shift from ~10% any time soon (barring the potential of forced mass early retirement due to AI).)
I was considering a more argumentative reply to your bullet points because I think they're not quite correct... There's a lot of nitpicking that could be done, and further elaborating the nuances might lead to a conclusion that, to the extent the points are true, they don't really matter -- in other words, my reaction to the list even in its strongest form (by my views anyway) is still kind of just a big shrug, so why bother trying to argue with it? I'll keep using Common Lisp. (Even despite my own pet complaints not on your list.) And given your final statement about sticking with it, I wonder if you also kind of shrug at the importance of those things.