Before saying some thing more let me tell you something about me. I am not truly professional programmer, but by accident I have became AutoCAD lisp programmer & now I am full time CAD Programmer. I have been successfully doing programing in Visual lisp, vb6 for last 10 years & recently started coding in vb.net & asp.net. Every time when new assignment comes to me I explore that whether I can do it in lisp, I don’t know what but there is some thing addictive in this language that a non-programmer like me has got habitat of it. I think I have said enough of me & I should come to the point.

I terribly think that creator of this language will be filling shame on our lisp fans community, just imagine before 50 years this incredible language was discovered & still it is competing with top class today’s programming languages. Do somebody need need to tell more about this great language. It is very clear that this language by hook or crook was totally ignored & gods wish it is slowly gaining popularity.

I don’t want to discuss here what gains we get why using LISP & with compare to other languages (there are many post already for this).

Lastly I just want to end my discussion my pleading to all Lisp fans, “OK guys, now its enough of proving how great LISP language is what we can do in it”. Now the time has come to do something extraordinarily which will make John soul somewhat peaceful.

I know I am writing something emotional & insensible here, but let me confess I do not have any good educational qualification , no good programming skills. I only know I love LISP language & I can go to any extent for contributing to it. I know some of my sentence will heartened guys who are really working hard on bringing this language to fame. But don’t take something negative feelings from this. I am just nervous b’coz we guys know how this language is still superior then any of today’s language (even after 50 years), and still we are googling just what is future of LISP.

I think we all need to contribute for this, & big guns in this field (Franz) should contribute more on this effort.

I think I have said enough, let me wait for some feedback from you guys to see what I am saying is meaningful or useless.

The magic of Lisp is that you can use it to make software that you just can’t make in other languages (including those other languages). But most programmers never need to (and specifically don’t want to) create software the likes of which the world has never seen, which is fine. If you want libraries, lambdas and LAMP, use Python, for God’s sake. If it’s good enough for Peter Norvig, it’s good enough.

Worse is indeed better (just look at PHP); but popularity is overrated. I’ve been programming for 20 years, and I can afford LispWorks Pro *and* its annual maintenance contract. (And if I couldn’t, and/or if I wasn’t required to use Windows, I’d be using SBCL, end of story.) I’d love to get more Lisp work and work with more Lispers, but I couldn’t give a wet slap whether Lisp is more or less popular than any other language. As they say, “when the student is ready, the master will appear”; it isn’t that hard to learn Lisp if you put your mind to it. I did, and I’m no Bram Cohen.

regarding the problem of ‘batteries included’ can be solved with a hint from the text below from Erik:

“the reason there _are_ a bunch of “libraries” and packages for all those ****** languages is that people probably didn’t feel bad about not having something nice, so they went ahead and made something ugly but at least functional. now, everyone’s happy, right? why not repeat this for *Common Lisp*, too? ”
qouted from http://groups.google.no/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4bda6a98e5cf0bce

A-ha! Here’s the disconnect. Perhaps all the old, nice Lisp hackers who are welcoming to newbies hang out on USENET, and all the smug jerks hang out on IRC. (I’ve had bad experiences on #lisp, too.)

Where’s a newbie more likely to go? As much as I love USENET, “we” (speaking as someone younger than 30) grew up with computers and want instant gratification, and that means IRC. If people are rude to us on IRC, we’re not likely to say “well, it’s probably just IRC; I bet USENET has nicer people”.

I wonder if #lisp can be fixed, or if we should spend our energy convincing people to try out comp.lang.lisp first instead. I suspect the more likely fix is that somebody will come up with a killer library for Lisp (a la Rails for Ruby), and people will flock to the IRC channel for that library, and we’ll just route around the meanness while not abandoning IRC altogether.