You know Lisp has hit the mainstream when the technology editor of eWeek says it has, as paraphrased by Jorn Barger, “matured into [a] credible Web-app platform.” (Also see the LtU article.)

The January release of Franz's Allegro Common LISP 8.0 puts developers on notice that “exotic” programming tools, long relegated to research environments, are becoming more viable options for mainstream applications.

[...]

The 8.0 version reflects performance-enhancing improvements so startling that if it played baseball, we'd expect a congressional probe.

[...]

Older versions of the Allegro environment fell short of competing development tools, even by the lower standards of bygone times. Version 8's source editor, debugger and other coding aids, however, have pulled abreast of the rising standard of the high-end Java environments that are LISP's most likely competitors.

Way to go, Franz. The release of ACL 8.0, with AllegroCache, a Linux IDE, a new high-level Windows COM interface, Windows scripting support and more, is a notable achievement. And little things like RSS feeds for ACL patches and for the LispWire site make me happy (though the LispWire feed should be auto-discoverable, and the Atom feed, at least, contains double-escaped HTML).

I am sad to report, however, that ACL 8.0 does in fact crash constantly (not really) on OS X in the same way SBCL does.