Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL projects, as I myself may do soon:
Is there a confirmation from all of the listed (and also unlisted) persons on the fact that they have stopped maintaining their stuff altogether? As you say below, there are a number of people who are not very active, but continue accepting occasional patches - that's, actually, very little work given the stability of most of their important projects that the community relies upon. I know about Nathan, and the majority of his projects are already taken care of by sharplispers.
At least Edi Weitz, Hans Huebner, Nathan Froyd have made it official (and soon me). Gabor Melis, Nikodemus Siivola — maybe it's just me they've been ignoring me for months on github, by mail and on twitter; maybe they still think they'll get back to Lisp some day; in the meantime their software has bitrotted on Quicklisp. David Lichteblau, Cyrus Harmon, Henrik Hjelte, Andreas Fuchs, Kevin Rosenberg, Samium Gromoff — I believe at least some of them have made it official. There are many more authors who have quit whose name doesn't come to me at this point, but that you'll identify as you skim the list of packages of Quicklisp. And there are just orphan packages, untouched in years.
And sometimes abandoned packages still work great, or are unused anyway, so that's fine. Software lives, software dies. Sometimes peacefully, sometimes in a fire.
However, consider that if you migrate to Sharplispers too eagerly, you may waste time; but if you wait for the bitrot to set in before you fork any given library, you won't see the PRs piling before the project is in such disarray that three people reimplement from scratch libraries that each do the 20% they need, further balkanizing the community.
I believe CL could benefit a lot from a little bit more coordination on library development and maintenance. But obviously, part of the reason I'm jumping ship is that I don't believe this is going to happen (the other part is my wanting to do things that can't be done on top of CL-provided abstractions). The activation energy for some kinds of interactions is too high in CL. And that's fine, to each his own.
It would be great to see a list of those projects to be able to assess the scale of the issue.
Not my job anymore. I would just rather pass the baton as I leave than drop it on the floor. But I'll drop it if no one takes it.
I used to chase after authors whose systems I broke as I evolved ASDF and it didn't support their abuse of ASDF internals or use of deprecated ASDF functionality, and so I noticed a lot of things (and remained blind to others of course). If anyone after me decides to keep improving ASDF (rather than merely keep it running as is), he'll notice as much.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org Suggesting I hate people with religion because I hate religion is like suggesting I hate people with cancer because I hate cancer. — Ricky Gervais