I'd hold off on getting too excited about this. Until it:
- Is fully featured and has a conditions and restarts system that works on JS, and has CLOS, multimethods, etc
- Has great interop with the existing JS ecosystem. No painful conversions to and from CL, works/is documented well with existing JS tooling like parcel, webpack, mocha, etc
- Is close to being fully featured and not just implementing <50% (usually <30%) of the features of the language
- Is production ready -- no weird compiler bugs, I can use this with real business
- Has a powerful linting tool -- A linting tool that can blacklist/whitelist a subset of common lisp macros and expressions that can be used in a project. You would need something like this for a real company to prevent the team from shooting themselves in the foot. Could probably be done in CL, sblint comes to mind but it's not well documented (like most lisp libraries) so I'm not sure.
- Culture changes: specifically the community needs to document things much better and be more pro-social instead of living on an island. Backend workflow needs good docs. Ex: I think fukamachi's web frameworks supersede weblocks afaict? not sure, but he has like half a dozen or so web frameworks and it's not obvious which one to choose. Ningle? utopian? caveman? clack + woo? documentation in most CL libraries are really lacking and you need to dig into the source
- Run CL programs without opening a debugger. Modern day workflows have CI pipelines and automation out the wazoo. CL expects you to run the debugger manually. There's a way to run asdf projects like a script but it's not well-documented
- The debugger needs to be more user friendly. Don't get me wrong, the debugger is one of the coolest features of CL, but asking a plain old JS dev to try to understand those low level stack traces is a form of torture. It's roots come from lower level programming, but newer devs want to use it for web app dev (like this to-js compiler posted here). A nicer, easier to understand layer like ReasonML's BetterErrors would be needed or an update to CL itself
- A real package manager. Not quicklisp -- that's a curated package list where you need to talk with a single person who approves it to get your package published
- Is fully featured and has a conditions and restarts system that works on JS, and has CLOS, multimethods, etc
- Has great interop with the existing JS ecosystem. No painful conversions to and from CL, works/is documented well with existing JS tooling like parcel, webpack, mocha, etc
- Is close to being fully featured and not just implementing <50% (usually <30%) of the features of the language - Is production ready -- no weird compiler bugs, I can use this with real business
- Has a powerful linting tool -- A linting tool that can blacklist/whitelist a subset of common lisp macros and expressions that can be used in a project. You would need something like this for a real company to prevent the team from shooting themselves in the foot. Could probably be done in CL, sblint comes to mind but it's not well documented (like most lisp libraries) so I'm not sure.
- Culture changes: specifically the community needs to document things much better and be more pro-social instead of living on an island. Backend workflow needs good docs. Ex: I think fukamachi's web frameworks supersede weblocks afaict? not sure, but he has like half a dozen or so web frameworks and it's not obvious which one to choose. Ningle? utopian? caveman? clack + woo? documentation in most CL libraries are really lacking and you need to dig into the source
- Run CL programs without opening a debugger. Modern day workflows have CI pipelines and automation out the wazoo. CL expects you to run the debugger manually. There's a way to run asdf projects like a script but it's not well-documented
- The debugger needs to be more user friendly. Don't get me wrong, the debugger is one of the coolest features of CL, but asking a plain old JS dev to try to understand those low level stack traces is a form of torture. It's roots come from lower level programming, but newer devs want to use it for web app dev (like this to-js compiler posted here). A nicer, easier to understand layer like ReasonML's BetterErrors would be needed or an update to CL itself
- A real package manager. Not quicklisp -- that's a curated package list where you need to talk with a single person who approves it to get your package published