But don't try to introduce Lisp into your company, unless you are a cofounder of that company. It's a career limiting move. Instead, work on something you're fond of in Lisp during your off hours.
Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?
21–30 of 138 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?
#22My personal choice would be Clojure. I learned Racket and Common Lisp but haven't used them build something production-grade yet. I don't even know how to properly build, deploy and monitor a Racket server yet. Racket is good but the toolchain and libraries are far behind Clojure. Especially Cider and Cursive are so great, and for libraries, there are a lot of solid ones like Ring/Compojure, interesting things like D…
Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?
#23Clojure doesn't mean digging into the Java world Use Graalvm if you want native quick starting binaries or start learning Clojure via ClojureScript
Writing the code is really the first stage of commitment to a language or platform. You are going to spend way more time running code than you spend writing it. The choice of platform is therefore more important than the choice of language in a lot of ways, and Clojure runs on the JVM (or some JVM-like solution like Graal) so you better have some JVM experts around.
Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?
#24A bit old now, and Schemes only, but still worth a quick look.
Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?
#25Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?
#26The various web/xml/xpath/database libraries for Common Lisp are well supported by SBCL (or vice versa) and make for a great programming experience for web things, in my opinion.
McCLIM also continues to improve and is an interesting, if not fully ready-for-prime-time, choice for interactive applications.
Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?
#27Clojure + JVM Ecology best fits your requirements.
The ultimate programming methodology, perfect unity and simplicity ---- [The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow](https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow)
Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?
#28Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?
#29 - be the most modern one
- have a robust ecosystem
- package management
- tooling
- can be used for building production-ready software
- be an easy sell to businesses
Clojure checks every single bullet point on that list; it - is *the most modern* Lisp that's designed from ground up (no historical baggage/cruft)
- is hosted on *the Java platform* (i.e., "the Java world"), which is so far the most robust enterprise software ecosystem. This means that you have access to the most robust package management system (Leiningen/Maven), the most battle-tested and production-quality libraries, and the most powerful development tools (e.g., IntelliJ IDEA), and etc.
- is created by a pragmatic/practical guy who wants to build production-ready software. It's not the result of an academic research/experiment/thesis.
- is the result of a trade-off that makes it an easier sell to businesses. Businesses tend to be more conservative when it comes to choosing a platform to invest on and usually prefer the ones that are battle-tested, well-established, and well-supported. As of right now, it's the Java platform. No other enterprise software ecosystem can hold a candle to it.
Of course, you don't have to take my word for it, see what others have to say about Clojure.[1]Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?
#30For a free CL, SBCL is very good. However it's a very "classic" kind of a language, with just text mode tools and a unix bias.
For a non-CL Lisp-like, Racket is fun, but their debugging story is not my favorite. But pragmatically speaking, Clojure is probably the better choice. It is based in the Java Runtime, so things don't work exactly like they would in a normal Lisp, but in exchange you get great interop with a ton of Java libraries and tools, which I think is a net positive.
That said, Franz ACL would still be my tool of choice, if non-free is not a deal-breaker. :)