Re^2: (OT) Has anyone gone from perl to lisp?

[Joost]

Perl integrates. CPAN. No such thing for Lisp or Haskell yet, which makes it awkward to be lazy. (Or: you spend more time re-inventing the wheel and steam engine.)

While it's broadly true that Lisp doesn't have as vast a centralized repository of extensions as CPAN (I have no experience with Haskell), asdf-install combined with cliki.net do provide a way to download, test and install many of the more interesting Common Lisp extensions.

Note that Common Lisp is "just" a standard, with quite a lot of implementations and because of the age of the standard (work on the standards started in the 1986, but lisp was already old back then) it doesn't include many of the things that nowadays are taken for granted, like threads and network APIs (and other parts seem very complex, like the official file system API).

All of this means that it's not always easy to make interesting extensions portable across implementations (though there's quite a lot of work going on to make it easier), which may explain why Lisp doesn't have as large a library of tools as Perl does.