On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Drew Crampsie drewc@tech.coop wrote:
I do, however, think that comparing the work produced by the open source CL community to that produced by multi-billion dollar corporations is both unfair and counter-productive. Apple and Google have something to sell, and are aggressively attempting to sell it to both users and developers. Their /raison d'etre/ is to produce tools that are useful for the casual developer and used by the masses.
The same can not be said of the Clozure team, the SBCL devs, the SLIME folk or us working slobs just trying to make a living using CL. If i had the resources of a mega-corporation behind me, do you think cliki would be held together with duct-tape and bubble gum, or common-lisp.net would look old and tired? Would the ALU wiki crash every few months and be generally a mess to work with? I'd like to think otherwise.
The root of the perceived problem is a lack of resources, not a lack of effort or desire on the part of the "lisp community".
I think Franz, Lispworks, ITA et al are vital parts of the "lisp community". I think the fact that none of them is paying anyone to maintain SLIME, ALU wiki, common-lisp.net &c is indicative of understandable but deplorable corporate myopia ("public goods cannot be produced by private businesses").