Alexander,
Here's my own interpretation of what Drew said, which I admit may or may not be what he had in mind. (I do agree that he said it in a rude way.) The heart of what he wrote is:
And i'm not convinced a mailing list for professional lisp developers needs more diatribes explaining how _we_ should 'fix' Common Lisp to make it 'cool' again.
This could be interpreted as "We don't need to do [those things]", but I think (hope) what he really meant was that it's not constructive to just *say* that we ought to do those things. It's more constructive to discuss why.
For a long time, I've been saying:
- The languages that have been vibrant and for which tools are flourishing are the ones that are (a) perceived as exciting, and/or (b) used by a large and/or growing community. It's hard to make this happen for Common Lisp.
(Just for one example: consider why lisp.org still makes Lisp look like a dusty historical artifact, as compared with python.org or ruby.org. The reasons for this are somewhat complicated and historical, but, for whatever reasons, the problem persists.)
- Nobody is paid to create better open-source Lisp programming environments. Doing a good IDE is hard. Even doing a Lisp plugin for Eclipse (which lets you share some of its existing mechanisms) is hard enough that the only one I know of is still pretty basic. Even here at ITA where so many of us use Lisp, I don't think we have one person assigned to improve or supersede Slime. We are trying get better code coverage checking so that we can improve our unit testing, but that's the only such thing going on that I am aware of.
- There is a lot of obsolete stuff in Common Lisp. I and others have written about this at some length. See http://ilc2009.scheming.org/node/7.
As for me, if the Google acquisition of ITA happens, chances are that I won't be allowed to use Common Lisp, and that it's unlikely that I'll ever have a chance to use it for a paid job ever again. Not impossible, but unlikely. There are reasons for that.
So as much as we may agree with the problems you are talking about, it's very hard to solve them for real.
-- Dan