Another language religious war. What the heck. I got some time, I'll jump in.
With all due respect, he's wrong on the library issue. Lisp lacks good libraries, period. Couple years ago I have a project in mind and tried to develop it in Lisp. I couldn't find good libraries on database binding, SMTP/POP3/MIME, threading, Unicode, etc. Most were abandon-wares or not complete. Sure I could have written them in Lisp, but then I would be developing Lisp libraries instead of my app.
The JGraphT example he picked was a bad one since Lisp supports the graph-like data structure happily. It's like saying you don't need a hashtable library since it's already supported natively in the language.
Edit: I don't mean to bash Lisp (I like it a lot and had done a Lisp implementation in C) but the standard Lisp library issue is a real one. It should not be just swept under the rug.
"With all due respect, he's wrong on the library issue. Lisp lacks good libraries, period. Couple years ago I have a project in mind and tried to develop it in Lisp. I couldn't find good libraries on database binding, SMTP/POP3/MIME, threading, Unicode, etc."
I don't understand why this objection comes up. CLSQL has been around since 2002, bordeaux-threads since 2006, CL-SMTP since 2005, SBCL has had Unicode support since 2003 or 2004, CLISP for even longer. All this stuff has been around even longer in commercial implementations. Where were you looking?
I remember Bordeaux-Threads was at 0.0.1 and not ready. Now it's at 0.7. Guess it's better now. The only feasible choice was to use paid proprietary vendor packages.
I have the LispWorks 64bit Enterprise Edition. It does provide Unicode, concurrent threads, database access, networking, GUI lib, ... Some of the other stuff I have loaded as libraries. My base image with software loaded is probably larger than SBCL's but it also contains more stuff.
LispWorks runs also nicely under Windows.
Possible drawback: it is commercial and not open source.
Not only that. It buys you one of the fastest Lisp implementations, which runs nicely on Windows, Linux and Mac - everywhere with native GUI. Windows isn't that well supported by open source Lisps. The commercial ones are much better in that respect. Though, for me the Mac OS X support is more important, since I'm also not a regular Windows user.
You might want to also have a look at ClozureCL for Windows[1]. It's very small and has some other nice features (OS level thread support, unicode, ...).
With all due respect, he's wrong on the library issue. Lisp lacks good libraries, period. Couple years ago I have a project in mind and tried to develop it in Lisp. I couldn't find good libraries on database binding, SMTP/POP3/MIME, threading, Unicode, etc. Most were abandon-wares or not complete. Sure I could have written them in Lisp, but then I would be developing Lisp libraries instead of my app.
The JGraphT example he picked was a bad one since Lisp supports the graph-like data structure happily. It's like saying you don't need a hashtable library since it's already supported natively in the language.
Edit: I don't mean to bash Lisp (I like it a lot and had done a Lisp implementation in C) but the standard Lisp library issue is a real one. It should not be just swept under the rug.