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Designing good multi-paradigm languages is very hard. I'm a big fan of Mozart-Oz and Common Lisp, and I think Odersky did a really good job with Scala. In fact, given that Common Lisp is languishing and Mozart was never a serious real world contender, Scala fills in a niche where there are not many competitors. C++, just for some use cases, Julia for others, and .NET.

The fact that many organizations working on massive datasets have embraced Scala proves there are not many alternatives around, sadly.



> Common Lisp is languishing

can you elaborate more on that?


I don't think CL is attracting a lot of new developers or there's a lot of new libraries getting developed. But I would be glad to be proven wrong. Perhaps Racket will eventually become a CL replacement, now it's adopting a lot of Chez low-level stuff and it's multiparadigm efforts keep growing.


Do you have any ideas why Racket has not had the commercial success of Clojure for example?


My guess would be the JVM. Racket is an academic language, designed for academia. At least it markets itself as such. Made to explore the design space of programming languages.

Clojure was designed and marketed for the enterprise. Builds on the JVM, full Java interop, emphasis on pragmatism.




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