LISP community and web frameworks

Question

In the reddit interview with Peter Norvig, he says

“For various reasons the set of web libraries and protocols were slower to develop in LISP than in other languages”

and consequently lisp adoption among the web community went down, and people went after languages with richer library sets.

Is there a reason for this slowness in the building up the web frameworks by the LISP community?

Answer 1

Mr. Norvig's remark seemed to me to be more historical than an assessment of the current situation. Perhaps in the mid to late 90s web related libraries didn't appear as quickly in Common Lisp as they did in other languages like Java.

But certainly today that is not the case. I can name no less than five Common Lisp web servers off the top of my head (CL-HTTP, Hunchentoot, S-HTTP-Server, Araneida, AllegroServe), not to mention mod-lisp for Apache. There must be nearly a dozen different web frameworks (KPAX, Weblocks, UncommonWeb, et al). And there are common lisp libraries for every web acronym you can name: SOAP, XML, XLST, FTP, XML-RPC, S3, AJAX.... ad infinitum. And there are tools that have no analog in other languages, like the wonder of wonders ParenScript.

See the Common Lisp Directory for a fat list of web libraries: http://www.cl-user.net , many of which are maintained at http://www.common-lisp.net