Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Edi Weitz]

On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 23:31:46 GMT, "Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Conjecture: Is it that the commericial versions of Lisp pull away
> some of the people who would otherwise help raise the default
> functionality of the free version?  I don't think so... but then
> why?

I'm pretty sure this is the case. If you lurk in c.l.l for a while
you'll see that a large part of the regular contributors aren't what
you'd call Open Source zealots. Maybe that's for historical reasons, I
don't know. But of course that's different from languages which have
always been "free" like Perl or Python.

To give one example: One of the oldest dynamic HTTP servers out there
is CL-HTTP.[1] I think it is very impressive but it has a somewhat
dubious license which doesn't allow for commercial deployment - it's
not "free." Maybe, I dunno, it would have a much higher market share
if it had been licensed like Apache when it was released. I'm sure
there's much more high-quality Lisp software out there that hasn't
even been released.

Edi.

[1] <http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/cl-http/home-page.html>

    Don't be fooled by the "Last updated" line. There's still active
    development - see

    <ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/users/jcma/cl-http/devo>.