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Why don't people like lisp?

Rainer Joswig joswig at lispmachine.de
Fri Oct 17 19:57:55 EDT 2003 
In article <DLydnTdiX___iw2iRVn-tQ at comcast.com>,
 "Terry Reedy" <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

> Did all the LMI companies adopt the same version of Lisp so an outside
> Lisper could write one program and sell it to run on all?  Or did they
> each adopt proprietary versions so they could monopolize what turned
> out to be dried-up ponds?  Again, did they all adopt uniform formats
> for distribution media, such as floppy disks, so that developers could
> easily distribute to all?  Or did they differentiate to monopolize?

(LMI is a name of a Lisp machine company)

Well, all did adopt Common Lisp. The reason for Common Lisp
was to come up with a common Lisp and work against the
fragmentation of the Lisp language. Some very large
software packages (like KEE) were able to run on all
of those. But much of the software has been developed
before Common Lisp (mid 80) in the 70s.
Btw., floppies were not used in the early times - the
machines had tape drives instead.
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