GUI: would you develop a commercial app (to pay your rent) in any of these apart from CAPI?

ML: You are joking, right?

I'd use Electron with Ceramic, not the GUI bindings. Or maybe Nuklear. But I would build personal projects with them.

ML: yeah, yeah. Just to show there have been work on it, that (of course) the platform is capable.

Anyway, I completely agree that Common Lisp is capable, my point also isn't that it's impossible to do things like GUIs, or write something cool and successful with it – just that the eco-system is not general-purpose language quality. If you want to make something that's successful commercially or as a well-adopted open-source project you have to be much more careful what problems you tackle than with a genuinely general purpose language.

Blog posts that claim otherwise really rub me the wrong way; I think it's possible to present CL in a favorable light without distorting reality and no one is gonna thank you later for joining the rank of people who missed out career-wise for making non-viable technology choices.

= not top-notch in all areas? Yeah, there's room for improvement. Buuut, given CL's features and stability, I will very much consider it for a commercial project in the future instead of, say, Python. I'd reject Python, for sure, for GUIs or web dev (except a small website maybe where admins would use the Django admin). Now I must find another language, and it's difficult. Many things drive me back to CL, including its state of libraries, actually pretty good compared to other languages, newer or older. No kidding.

> If you want to make something that's successful commercially or as a well-adopted open-source project

maybe. Reading you, it seems one should avoid using CL altogether. But there's a lot of room for a successful use of CL before falling into these categories: one-off scripts, quick GUIs at work, personal tools? Commercial websites (with adequate requirements), like I did? yes, it's possible to use CL for that. Yes, it is possible to do web development for a job with CL (what kind of sites? We have to ask the few redditors that do it). My point is that CL is general-purpose enough so that it could be more used in the wild (because it is used in the wild).

Anyways. Just trying to be positive :)

Yeah, I'm not arguing against that at all. I just hate articles which encourage people towards doomed efforts rather than building out existing areas of strengths or address things that are real obstacles towards using them. I'd like CL to be around for at least long enough till all it's important ideas have made it into other programming languages ;)

For example, one core strength of CL is that it's the about the only really interactive/malleable/live language that can generate pretty performant code, and for sbcl you can hook deeply into the machine code generation as well. Luajit is nicer in some ways (e.g. much smaller footprint in every possible way) but CL has a much more sophisticated interactive development experience (restarts, powerful debugging, pretty-printing etc. etc.). So tooling for automation of binary rewriting, refactoring and hardening like GrammarTech seems to be working on (see https://github.com/GrammaTech?utf8=&q=&type=&language=common...) seems like a much more promising area to work on with common lisp to me than e.g. generic web development.