"CL went through a spike of interest in the mid-2000s; where did those people go . . ."<p>I don't know about others, but I was part of that spike and I went . . . far away from Common Lisp.<p>Learning Lisp absolutely blew my mind. I felt like every page of Peter Siebel's <i>Practical Common Lisp</i> was some new kind of glorious revelation. I was going to write everything in Common Lisp.<p>I did write some fairly serious things in CL, but in the end, it came down to what felt like a broken, barely documented, half-assed ecosystem for doing most of the things that ordinary working programmers want to do.<p>I realize that sounds harsh and unfair (though I'm hardly the first person to put it in those terms), but the problem is relative. It's not a total disaster as such, but if you're used to the ecosystems of languages like Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Javascript -- almost anything else (including, in recent years, Haskell) -- you'll probably find yourself frustrated with CL. I did, anyway.<p>So what did I do? I abandoned CL and took my knowledge over to languages like JavaScript (cum Underscore) and Clojure.<p>The OP ends that quote above by asking "What can we learn from that?" I don't know. I don't know how a group of brilliant programmers working in one of the most brilliant languages of all time end up turning enthusiastic newbs into people who feel frustrated and disappointed. But I'll say it: It for damn sure ain't the language or the skills of the people who work with it.
The reason I have stuck with Common Lisp, rather than bailed to Clojure or something else, is that the language is so fundamentally good -- Mature, robust, standarized, performant, compiled, gradually-typed -- that it is worth sticking with it, it is worth working to expand its ecosystem.<p>Regarding the ecosystem, Common Lisp has improved a lot over the recent years. We have Clack (Equiv. of Python's WSGI/Ruby's Rack), a bunch of web frameworks, an ORM, a small set of web-related tools built around those. It's certainly nowhere near the size of the ecosystems of Ruby and Python, but I think it's acceptable given the size of the community.<p>I do, however, think there has to be a movement like Fare's "Lisp library consolidation"[0] to, if not expand, improve the existing libraries: Build Github Project Pages, Sphinx documentation, a better-looking wiki. Just porting old READMEs to Markdown would be an improvement.<p>[0]: <a href="http://fare.livejournal.com/169346.html" rel="nofollow">http://fare.livejournal.com/169346.html</a>
I was looking up some info on hash tables in Scheme the other day and came across this insightful HN comment:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=531079" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=531079</a><p>I imagine the same applies to CL.<p>I personally use and love Clojure, but wish it compiled to native code.