Whither .NET Lisp by Franz?

Here's a short email conversation about whether or not a .NET version of Franz Lisp exists. This started with a comment posted to this blog by Zach Beane (who apparently thinks I'm a "Smug Lisp Weenie." Is this a Good Thing? See the July 18 entry on his Live Journal blog).

Zach mentioned a posting on Google Groups discussing the existence of a .NET Lisp. I sent the following message to the author, Duane Rettig of Franz, Inc.:

I just read your discussion on the (lack of) virtues for targeting the .NET CLR for a Lisp implementation (http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=47kp4j52c.fsf%40beta.franz.com).

Based on the date of your post, and that the study you referenced was two years old then, it's been four years since that study.

Has the CLR moved any closer to being Lisp-ready? Does Franz have any current plans to implement a .NET Lisp?

Thanks for your time.

Here is Duane's response:

We are researching it. I am not a part of that research, and I am getting ready for vacation (you just caught me before going out the door), so you might want to broaden your query to either sales@franz.com or support@franz.com. If you have our product, you can also ask your account representative directly.

Duane

So, per Duane's suggestion, I asked the same question of Franz' support team. Here's their response:

Thanks for your question. We are looking at ways to interface .Net with Allegro CL, but have not made any recent formal news announcements about it at this time. If you have special needs or things you'd like to see happen in this area, please let us know.

So, they're looking into it, but have nothing to report.

Too bad.

The Best Laid Plans...

You know, a few weeks ago, I was hot-to-trot about learning Lisp. Sadly, two weeks of traveling for work has taken a bit of the fervor our my plans.

Recent events at work now leave me with a strong sense that I need to learn .NET: ASP.NET, .NET Web Forms, .NET Windows Forms, etc., etc., etc.... Lisp Learning may have to take a backseat.

I'm also pondering the relative merits of Visual Python (a .NET version of Python) versus C#.NET (I'm fluent in VB, and could easily transition to VB.Net, but I've always preferred the C/Java/C# style of languages over VB).

I know Python will be more productive than C#, but will it's loose-typing and late binding be up to the task of building a high-quality, commerical, end-user application that leverages MS' product automation (e.g., linking together a number of apps through automation)?

Naturally, I wondered whether there's a .NET implementation of Lisp. There is. Sort of. There's a project at Northwestern University that is an implementation of Scheme that targets .NET. It hasn't been updated since 2002, though. And it's current version is 0.5 -- in alpha status at SourceForge. We won't be building out mousetrap in Lisp.NET.

Plus, the tools for Lisp, like XUnit (look for Common Lisp), ant, etc., don't seem to exist for Lisp.

Of course, it could be that the Lisp Way isn't conducive to creating tools like in other languages. Using Macros and "reflection" by parsing Lisp code directly is probably the Lisp Way.

We shall see....

At any rate, it looks like there's no real .NET implementation of Lisp. Too bad, too. That would have been fun.