awesome-lisp-companies VS clog

Thanks to ITA Software (powering Kayak and Orbitz), Google dedicates resources to open-source Common Lisp development. More specifically, to SBCL:

> Doug Katzman talked about his work at Google getting SBCL to work with Unix better. For those of you who don’t know, he’s done a lot of work on SBCL over the past couple of years, not only adding a lot of new features to the GC and making it play better with applications which have alien parts to them, but also has done a tremendous amount of cleanup on the internals and has helped SBCL become even more Sanely Bootstrappable. That’s a topic for another time, and I hope Doug or Christophe will have the time to write up about the recent improvements to the process, since it really is quite interesting.

> Anyway, what Doug talked about was his work on making SBCL more amenable to external debugging tools, such as gdb and external profilers. It seems like they interface with aliens a lot from Lisp at Google, so it’s nice to have backtraces from alien tools understand Lisp. It turns out a lot of prerequisite work was needed to make SBCL play nice like this, including implementing a non-moving GC runtime, so that Lisp objects and especially Lisp code (which are normally dynamic space objects and move around just like everything else) can’t evade the aliens and will always have known locations.

https://mstmetent.blogspot.com/2020/01/sbcl20-in-vienna-last...

https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/yes-google-develops-comm...

The ASDF system definition facility, at the heart of CL projects, also comes from Google developers.

While we're at it, some more companies using CL today: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

Everyone, if you don't have a clue on how's Common Lisp going these days, I suggest:

https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/these-years-in-common-li... (https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/107oejk/these_years_i...)

A curated list of libraries: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl

Some companies, the ones we hear about: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

and oh, some more editors besides Emacs or Vim: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... (Atom/Pulsar support is good, VSCode support less so, Jetbrains one getting good, Lem is a modern Emacsy built in CL, Jupyter notebooks, cl-repl for a terminal REPL, etc)

Examples (for Common Lisp, so not citing Emacs): reddit v1, Google's ITA Software that powers airfare search engines (Kayak, Orbitz…), Postgres' pgloader (http://pgloader.io/), which was re-written from Python to Common Lisp, Opus Modus for music composition, the Maxima CAS, PTC 3D designer CAD software (used by big brands worldwide), Grammarly, Mirai, the 3D editor that designed Gollum's face, the ScoreCloud app that lets you whistle or play an instrument and get the music score,

but also the ACL2 theorem prover, used in the industry since the 90s, NASA's PVS provers and SPIKE scheduler used for Hubble and JWT, many companies in Quantum Computing, companies like SISCOG, who plans the transportation systems of european metropolis' underground since the 80s, Ravenpack who's into big-data analysis for financial services (they might be hiring), Keepit (https://www.keepit.com/), Pocket Change (Japan, https://www.pocket-change.jp/en/), the new Feetr in trading (https://feetr.io/, you can search HN), Airbus, Alstom, Planisware (https://planisware.com),

or also the open-source screenshotbot (https://screenshotbot.io), the Kandria game (https://kandria.com/),

and the companies in https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies and on LispWorks and Allegro's Success Stories.

https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/

http://opusmodus.com/

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/cad/3d-design

http://www.izware.com/mirai

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scorecloud-express/id566535238

> but there doesn't seem to be one that really stands out as pragmatic, industrial

disagree ;) This industrial language is Common Lisp.

Some industrial uses:

- http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html

- https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

- https://lisp-lang.org/success/

Example companies: Intel's programmable chips, the ACL2 theorem prover (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2015.039...), urban transportation planning systems (SISCOG), Quantum Computing (HRL Labs, Rigetti…), big data financial analysis (Ravenpack, they might be hiring), Google, Boeing, the NASA, etc.

ps: Python competing? strong disagree^^

and of course, a quite recent list of companies, in addition of LW's success stories page: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

Hey there, newer member of the first group here. Please see https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ to update your meta-comment. So, is CL used in the industry today, yes or no?

Personal note: I much prefer to maintain a long-living software in Common Lisp rather than in Python, thank you very much. May all the new programmers learn easily and all the teams have lots of ~~burden~~ work with Python, good for them.

Common Lisp has many industrial uses though.

(https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

https://lisp-lang.org/success/

http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html

such as

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/ (theorem prover used by big corp©)

https://allegrograph.com/press_room/barefoot-networks-uses-f... (Intel programmable chip)

quantum compilers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32741928

etc, etc, etc)

A few more that we know of, using CL today: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

Others: https://lisp-lang.org/success/

yes

https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies

http://lisp-lang.org/success/

industrial theorem prover, design of Intel chips, quantum compilers...

and little me, being more productive and having more fun than with python to deploy boring tools (read a DB, format the data, send to FTP servers, show a web interface...).

Reminds me of the approach of CLOG (Common Lisp Omnificent Gui[1]) and its ancestor GNOGA (The GNU Omnificent GUI for Ada[2]).

They also integrate basic components and even graphical UI editor (at least for CLOG), so you can essentially develop the whole thing from inside CL or Ada

[1] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

[2] https://github.com/alire-project/gnoga

For me David Botton [0] with his work including code, support and videos is doing very nice work in this direction.

I use SBCL for everything but work because I cannot get; we are getting there, but like you say, it’s such a nice experience working interactively building fast that it is magic and it’s painful returning to my daily work of Python and typescript/react. It feels like a waste of time/life, really.

[0] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

I was following along on the Windows page and didn't check back on the main README to see if any of the other instructions would help.

It the answer is "latter", then you could look at Common Lisp and Reblocks (https://40ants.com/reblocks/) or CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog).

I haven't used Clojure professionally in 10 years so with a grain of salt here are my thoughts as only one other person answered...

CL over Clojure: it's the OG Lisp that the creator of Clojure used and wanted to continue using but faced too much resistance from management afraid of anything not-Java/not-Oracle, or not-CLR/not-Microsoft, etc. Clojure shipped originally as "just another jar" so devs could "sneak" it in. If you don't have such a management restriction, why Clojure? If you want to integrate CL with the JVM, you can use the ABCL implementation, there's also something from one of the proprietary Lisps. Some useful CL features that are nice in this domain: conditions and restarts mentioned in a sibling comment (very nice to help interactively develop/debug e.g. a selenium webdriver test), ability to easily compile an exe (perhaps useful for microservices, or just to keep your deployment environment clean and not having to care about Lisp), and ability to easily ship with an open local socket allowing you to SSH in (or SSH port forward) and debug/fix/poke around in production (JVM of course lets you attach debuggers to a running process, even certain billion+ dollar companies will have supervised/limited prod debugging sessions for various hairy cases, but it's not as interactive). You should never hear CL advocates claim you can't scale to large teams/groups of engineers or large multi-million-lines sized projects, though you might oddly hear Clojure advocates sometimes claim you can't (and shouldn't) scale to such large projects -- large groups of engineers are a non-issue for them as well though, the challenge is in hiring, not in the language somehow making it impossible to modularize and keep people from stepping on each other.

Clojure over CL: its integration with the JVM is nicer than ABCL's, so if you do actually want a lot of the great world of Java stuff, it's easier to get at. Database integration libraries are better. Access to libs (Clojure or Java) is via Maven, so it's a larger ecosystem with more self-integrating components (especially around monitoring/metrics) than what's available for Lisp via Quicklisp. Clojure is very opinionated, much of it quite tasteful, and that gives the whole ecosystem a certain consistency. (You can have immutable data structures in CL, you can if you want use [] for literal vectors and make them syntactically important e.g. in let bindings, but not everyone will be on board.) Even though its popularity seems to have stopped growing, at least at the same rate as e.g. Go which it was keeping pace with for a while, it's still popular enough with a bigger community; as a proxy measure there are multiple conferences around the world and good talks at adjacent conferences, whereas Lisp mostly just has one conference in Europe per year and only occasional branching outside of that.

If you're doing a client-side-heavy webapp, ClojureScript is still amazing, CL's answers there aren't very compelling with the exception of CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog) which takes an entirely different direction than the usual idea of translating/running Lisp on top of JavaScript and its popular frameworks.