unCLog

Joel Reymont is leaning toward Ruby on Rails over Lisp for web application development and I don't get it. Joel is very smart and on top of things and I figure that he's right: Lisp just isn't there yet when it comes to building web applications quickly and easily unless you want to make it half your own private research project.

But Why? Lisp is good. Lisp excels at Domain Specific Languages. Lisp has the REPL for goodness sake. It can't just be that there are many Lisp dialects / implementations and that it's a bit hard to get, say, a socket library that works on all of them... can it? I mean, the MediaWiki runs on PHP (I think) and everything I've seen or heard about PHP is "...ick...". So why does the MediaWiki have all the loving goodness and we have the CLiki? (This isn't to diss the CLiki by the way, it's cool; I like it but as wikis go there isn't much there and nothing much has happened to it for ages.)

So bloggers on Planet Lisp, start your engines please... I'd like several essays from people who know the skinny on web dev and Lisp. Is Joel wrong? Is there a missing secret ingredient? what does Lisp need to come from behind in the web application development language race? After all, Ruby was a dark horse until Rails came along. The best essay gets a prize (to be announced later once I think of something).

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