WHY Common Lisp? (translation of Mr. KURODA's article)

One of the most frequently asked question is

"Why should we write in Common Lisp?"

I have been asked by the student who I had interview recently.
I think the reason why Common Lisp must be chosen is that it is the ANSI Standard
The program which will be used for 10 to 20 years should be written in the standardized language.

Why?

The biggest reason is because it is standard so it is promised to find maintainers.
For "the people who don't know Common Lisp", then, let them read specification, there is no need to buy piled up magazines at bookstores every month. As long as there is a standard, "don't know, then can't write, maintain" can not be a reason.
The other reason is standard can make it competitive. Multiple vendors release multiple implementation to the market under the same specification then the principle of competition moves. Each vendors can join to the market with their proprietary field that can be performance, price, extension or user support. Users can have a lot of choices.

By the way, there are more than 9 implementations of Common Lisp.

In other words, The language which implementation decides its semantics such as perl, ruby, python, etc should not be used for serious development. Nowadays, open source is popular, however, the thing should be open is not source but specification.
If you think like this, we have really limited number of programming language that we may use.

The programming language which have realistic specification in ANSI, ISO or JIS are not so many, as I can only list up COBOL, FORTRAN, ADA, PL/1, C/C++ and Common Lisp. Everything can work multiple platforms including PC, however let's say "what is the one we can write web server with realistic cost?", then answer will be C/C++ or Common Lisp.

Therefore, the question which programming language you will use is the same as

C/C++ without gc or Common Lisp with gc, which do you use?

this question.

KURODA Hisao (2004-06-10)

This page is translated without any permission. So if the original author claims to delete, it will be deleted. I could not find the contact, if someone knows it please let me know.