[FoRK] Top general purpose languages: Practical choices for app logic / presentation & web / server apps

[Stephen Williams]

On 1/20/11 7:03 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 07:20:33PM -0800, Stephen Williams wrote:
>
>
>> For server development, the top candidates are Java, Python, Ruby, and
> Why not Lisp?
>
Actually, Erlang is far more popular than Lisp for server tasks these days (RabbitMQ, Ejabberd).  Googling shows these for Lisp however:
http://www.cl-http.org:8001/cl-http/
http://www.cliki.net/Web
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/25/1553220
http://lisp-js.posterous.com/lispjs-a-lisp-for-nodejs-0

This list seems incomplete, but perhaps it is just the narrow definition of "application server":
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Comparison_of_application_servers#Common-Lisp_Language

I always liked Lisp (and Forth / Postscript), and you could implement whatever paradigm you want in it, however I don't think I'd be 
as efficient as C++/Java.  At some level however, you can use whatever language as long as you have good library access and the 
language doesn't get in your way of writing / debugging.

With things like code generators, Java bytecode generators (Jython, etc.), and Java annotations (and Objective-C, Javascript 
equivalents), we're getting a lot of the flexibility that only Lisp used to have.

sdw