This is old news, but I recently saw a reference on usenet to a 2001 lisp survey from International Technology & Trade Associates, Inc. : LISP Power And Functionality Still A Well-Kept Secret.
I don't know who ITTA is or what agenda they may have, but they did gather some slightly interesting data.
For example, the breakdown of the lisp market by "vendor" was
| 59% | Franz |
| 11% | Digitool |
| 11% | Xanalys |
| 8% | cmucl |
| 5% | clisp |
| 3% | scheme |
| 3% | symbolics |
The Franz number may be slightly inflated relative to the others, as Franz encouraged some of their customers to fill out the survey.
Most of the survey results really just report on the opinions of the lisp community, of which the most important one is that lisp is a superior programming language.
Well, duh.
I'm not sure how useful it is to know that lispers like lisp. But then ITTA goes on to say
The pressure is on Lisp users and vendors to increase their level of interaction and consider ways to grow and revitalize the Lisp community. One option is to develop a supported Lisp open-source development environment. However, no one within the community seems willing to take the lead in such a development (such as Linus Torvald did with Linux) -- or seems willing to even supply code. (This may be partially due to the proprietary nature of many of the successful Lisp projects in industry).
I don't think that focusing all development effort on a single open-source lisp is desirable, or realistic, but there are in fact several lisps giving away code, and ITTA was already aware of cmucl at the least. So the conclusion seems completely silly to me.
Posted by jjwiseman at July 09, 2002 12:12 AM