On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 02:15:49PM +0800, Rommel Martinez wrote:
> I come to LispWorks from a SLIME background.

I come from a Vim / VILisp background, Lisp-wise.

> I'd like to know what is it with LispWorks that makes its users
> stick with it.  What do you think makes LispWorks superior over
> other CL development environments?  What makes you say that the
> licensing fee you paid for is worth it?

The more I used Lisp, the more everything else seemed to suck.  I
wanted an environment I could spend all my time in that was Common
Lisp all the way down, or at least as close as I could reasonably get.
"Reasonable" varies for everyone, of course; for me, it meant getting
a good Lisp IDE, with a good editor and FFI (as opposed to, say,
running SBCL on top of Movitz on the bare metal).

I chose Lispworks over Franz because they don't charge per-head
licensing fees, their editor does syntax highlighting, which I like a
lot (Franz's doesn't, at least in the free version), and because they
provide the source for their editor, which makes it easier to hack.
(For some of that hacking see <http://theclapp.org//blog/tags/vim_mode/>.)

As an aside, given all the energy people put into discussions of
Emacs's flaws (bytecode, elisp, single-threaded), I'm frankly
surprised (though only a little :) that more people don't buy
Lispworks just for the editor.  It's compiled to machine language, in
Common Lisp, and multi-threaded.  I guess it's easier to complain than
to pony up $1500, but maybe I'm unusual in my stance that since I
spend most of my time in my editor I'm willing to spend money to make
it a good experience.  (Or maybe I've just drunk the Lisp Kool-Aid and
am insane.  Take your pick.  :)

Anecdote: When I called Lispworks to place my order, Dave Fox took my
order personally, and we had a nice chat.  When I renewed, I happened
to speak with Dave again (even though it was 7 or 8pm in the UK), and
we had a nice chat about iPhone development, and whether or not
Lispworks would be doing anything for the iPhone.  There's no real
point to this story other than to say that Lispworks support is very
good.  :)

-- Larry Clapp