Which is the best implementation of LISP family of languages for real world programming ?

[Pascal Costanza]

On 12/06/2010 19:36, bolega wrote:

> What was your main reason for picking the Allegro (commercial) as
> opposed to one of the open source ones ? Is there anything in this old
> norvig book that makes it worth pursuing as a text ?
>
> http://norvig.com/paip.html

My favorite Common Lisp environment is LispWorks, which is a commercial 
offering, but I regularly deal with many other Common Lisp 
implementations as well, including both commercial ones and open source 
ones, due to my role as a maintainer of a compatibility layer that is 
widely used.

When I started using Common Lisp a couple of years ago, I started with a 
commercial environment (Macintosh Common Lisp back then). The main 
reason was that this allowed me to focus on learning the language, while 
being able to use an IDE that was relatively close to what other IDEs 
offered in a familiar way. Back then, it seemed too much of a hassle to 
set up an environment using Emacs + some open source Common Lisp 
implementation, which was (and still is) the most widely used choice in 
a pure open source setting.

I still believe that this is a major strength of the commercial systems, 
that you have a mostly hassle-free set up and can directly go into 
learning and/or programming in Common Lisp, without having to install, 
set up, and/or learn other tools, which may be non-trivial. (Of course, 
if you are already used to using Emacs, for example, this may be less of 
a problem for you.)

Some people have the fear that there is a risk of a vendor lock-in if 
you go the commercial route. However, that's not really true: The 
portability of Common Lisp code across different implementations is 
excellent, and it is very hard to paint yourself into a corner. Since 
the commercial systems also provide free editions, which have some 
limitations but are usually more than good enough for learning purposes, 
you can also decide to just use them for learning, and then still make 
your mind up later on which implementation you eventually go with - at a 
stage when you can make a well-informed, and thus better choice. In 
fact, it seems to me that it's quite common that Common Lisp users do 
use several implementations on a regular basis, taking advantage of 
their various strengths depending on the task at hand.

Just my €0.02.


Pascal

-- 
My website: http://p-cos.net
Common Lisp Document Repository: http://cdr.eurolisp.org
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