Curated Picks

A February 2024 Reddit thread with over 150 comments discussed Common Lisp's limited adoption. The conversation clustered around three recurring claims: that the perceived reliance on Emacs raises the activation energy for developers accustomed to VS Code; that macro-heavy codebases create maintainability and onboarding challenges; and that early fragmentation prior to standardization, combined with costly proprietary tooling, delayed the availability of free implementations. Several experienced Lisp developers pushed back on the maintainability argument, arguing that macro misuse is largely a process issue and that code review and contemporary engineering practices limit the problem in practice. The discussion remained qualitative.

A February 2024 Hacker News thread with over 300 comments discussed Common Lisp's persistent adoption issues. Participants raised a mix of technical complaints, including linked list performance, pathname abstractions, and inconsistent REPL behavior, alongside ecosystem problems such as package fragmentation and limited documentation. The original post attributed Common Lisp's stagnation to the absence of a centralized fundraising or coordinating body comparable to Python’s PSF, citing PyCon's reported $1.2M in revenue as an example of what such structures enable.

Many responses disputed that explanation, arguing that structural funding alone would not address deeper constraints. Frequently cited factors included macro-heavy DSL usage leading to hard-to-maintain code, lack of long-term corporate backing when compared to languages like Rust or Python, and a high initial learning curve that limits early adoption. The thread did not converge on a single cause, leaving governance, language design, and historical timing as competing explanations.

Common Lisp was used for JPL's Remote Agent autonomous control system, which successfully operated NASA's Deep Space 1 mission in 1999. According to the project engineer, Lisp enabled in-flight debugging via a REPL, crucial for resolving a race condition undetected during ground tests. Despite this, political pressure and integration challenges with C led management to mandate a shift to C++ and later Java, citing industry best practices. Lisp was subsequently phased out at JPL, though the author notes the decision stemmed partly from unreliable C-based interprocess communication, not language deficiencies.