A wondering of mine...

[Owain]

Hello. I have been programming in (common) Lisp for about a week now. I have a pretty rudimentary knowledge of the language (I am about half way through 'Practical Common Lisp'). I am already finding Lisp a really enjoyable and incredibly powerful language to use. So much so that I prefer it to C++ and C, by quite a long way. I just don't understand why Lisp isn't used by everyone for everything. I have programs that I have written in Lisp that use only about a quarter the amount of lines as programs I have written in C++, and been far more efficient. Its better for almost every purpose I can think of. On the internet, I have found may people share my view, so I just don't understand why its not as well-used as it deserves to be.

[Goheeca]

Yes, it deserves a bigger user base. I think, that's the problem and it's a vicious circle together with newbie-repellent parentheses as a departure.
// And I'm observing that CL (or Lisp generally) libraries haven't got totally good documentation resp. quite poor one.

[Owain]

I think the parentheses are great, but I guess that their quite alien and a bit scary compared to other languages for some people. Someone should write some great framework in Lisp so people can see how good it is.

I dont know about the libraries, I haven’t used Lisp enough to write real programs using other libraries. Most of my favorite libraries have Lisp ports, but I dont know how reliable they are, I havent used them yet.