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.
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The 8.0 version reflects performance-enhancing improvements so startling that if it played baseball, we'd expect a congressional probe.
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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.
Posted by jjwiseman at February 07, 2006 09:27 AMYou'd think with their highly advanced development processes they'd be able to release the Trial version at the same time as the real thing... alas, no trial yet :(
Posted by: ZmmZ on February 7, 2006 02:03 PMI certainly hope you don't think it's a dev issue. They simply want to drive as many people to the real version as possible.
They may also be trying to decide if they want to include all the goodies in 8.0 or not. I don't think, given their desire not to release a full version for non-commercial use like a real market leader would, that they would want to give users all the 8.0 goodies and just limit heap size again.
They think AllegroCache is something they'll take out. Watch for it.
Posted by: Brandon Werner on February 9, 2006 12:03 PM