awesome-lisp-companies
coalton
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awesome-lisp-companies | coalton | |
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50 | 84 | |
571 | 966 | |
- | 4.6% | |
6.8 | 8.4 | |
1 day ago | 6 days ago | |
Common Lisp | ||
- | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
awesome-lisp-companies
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Why Is Common Lisp Not the Most Popular Programming Language?
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)
yet no other language gives so many tools to the developer… quantum companies would disagree. https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/
(BTW: CL isn't Smalltalk which isn't uniquely that anymore, we do use source files and we can compile single-file binaries. My web app weights 35MB, starts up in 0.4s (or 0.01s without core compression))
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We need to talk about parentheses
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/
https://www.ptc.com/en/products/cad/3d-design
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scorecloud-express/id566535238
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A Tour of Lisps
Haven't had a lisp job, so maybe I shouldn't comment, but... I did use CL and Clojure on the job for a few things at my last two places. It's easier to find Clojure companies (and them to find you) than Common Lisp ones. You might want to peruse https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies from time to time and see if any have openings. There's other resources linked too and of course there's the reddit and discord community (such as there is) hubs. You can also see if there are any meetups in your area, that's how I almost ended up at a Clojure startup some years back.
I should have taken strategy notes after talking to a guy at my last job who got management buy-in to rewrite a lot of Java code (for android) to Kotlin and have all new code for android be in Kotlin (before that was considered the sensible default). I think that's in general a better approach for a lot of would-be paid lispers: don't wait for or look for the lisp job, make the lisp job. Whether that's doing work where the customer doesn't care what language the thing is made in, or introducing it (some have even snuck it in -- the original clojure.jar got a lot of early success that way) to an existing work place. What I somewhat remember from my conversation was that if you can make a good technical case and have at least one other person supporting you (ideally your entire dev team as was his case), it's a lot easier to sell. No one raised bogus concerns about increasing the hiring difficulty or effort learning the new system. (I say bogus because engineers are learning all the time, and huge swathes of the industry have already had to do things like migrate from ObjC to Swift, or the various versions of JavaScript and later TypeScript + all the framework churn, switching IDEs; learning and change are quite common and a non-issue.) From other Lisp company reports, getting a new hire up to speed to be productive with the team using Common Lisp is a matter of a week or two, a small portion of the overall onboarding time a lot of new jobs have. Mastery takes longer, of course, but that's different.
If I had stayed longer at my last job I would have continued to flesh out a better demo for interactive selenium webdriver tests for our main Java application after injecting ABCL into it, it seemed like the easiest vector to get more interest from my team and other teams. It kind of sucks when you're debugging a broken test and finally hit an exception but now you have to start over again (especially if you stepped too far in the debugger), especially with heavy webdriver tests that can take a long time. The Lisp debugging experience is so much better... And when writing the test from scratch, it's very interactive, you type code and execute it and verify the browser did what you intended. When you're done you run it again from scratch to verify.
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All of Mark Watson's Lisp Books
> 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^^
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Steel Bank Common Lisp
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.
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Racket: The Lisp for the Modern Day
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)
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Why Lisp Syntax Works
A few more that we know of, using CL today: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/
Others: https://lisp-lang.org/success/
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How to Understand and Use Common Lisp
yes
https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies
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...).
coalton
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How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)
It's still… not the same. In CL (and specially with SBCL), we get compile time (type) errors and warnings at the blink of an eye, when we compile a single function with a keystroke (typically C-c C-c in Slime).
And there's also been improvement, see Coalton for a ML on top of CL. (https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/)
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Embracing Common Lisp in the Modern World
Common Lisp has bad marketing (even OCaml has Twitch streamers and "influencers" now), and bad support for general editors, both of which make it a non-starter for most curious people who have an afternoon to try something. But behind all that is magnificent activity for those who got over the initial potential energy barrier. Just to give some examples:
1. SBCL, the most popular open source implementation of Lisp, is seeing potentially two new garbage collectors. One of them is a parallel collector written by a university student (!!) which blows my mind.
2. SBCL has better and better support for deploying Liwp as a C-compatible shared library, using SBCL-LIBRARIAN. It makes it play nicer with other applications in C and Python.
3. Coalton is another exciting development that allows a Haskell type system and "Lisp-1" functional programming in Common Lisp. That means type classes (or traits), something Lisp hasn't really had a proper notion of, and full type inference. Persistent sequences based off of RRB-trees were recently merged, and interestingly, they're implemented purely in Coalton [1]. That means Clojure-like seqs.
It's interesting to see users of Lisp generating the above ideas and libraries, not a special in-group of committees, "official" developers, etc.
[1] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/blob/main/library/se...
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Steel – An embedded scheme interpreter in Rust
Use an editor that auto-inserts parens and that indents the code correctly. Now nothing bad can happen. And the parens are used to edit code structurally.
re typing: Coalton brings Haskell-like typing on top of CL. https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ Other lisps are typed: typed racket, Carp… and btw, SBCL's compiler brings some welcome type warnings and errors (unlike Python, for instance).
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Show HN: Collaborative Lisp Coding on Discord
If you like type safety, this project would be perfect for using https://coalton-lang.github.io/ so your REPL supported Common Lisp out of the gate.
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A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
Agree that you can use types to express and prove logical properties via compiler; it can be a fun way to solve a problem though too much of it tends to frustrate coworkers. It's also not exactly "low cost"; here's an old quip I have in my quotes file:
"With Scala you feel smart having just got something to work in a beautiful way but when you look around the room to tell your clojure colleague how clever you are, you notice he left 3 hours ago and there is a post-it saying use a Map." --Daniel Worthington-Bodart
> On the contrary, they're still the most effective technique we've found for improving program correctness at low cost.
This is not borne out by research, such as there is any of any quality: https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ The best intervention to improve correctness, if not already being done, is code review: https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1120495752969641986 This doesn't necessarily mean dynamic types are better, just that if static types are better, they aren't tremendously so to obviously show in studies, unlike code review benefit studies.
My own bias is in favor of dynamic types, though I think the way Common Lisp does it is a lot better than Python (plus Lisp is flexible enough in other ways to let static type enthusiasts have their cake and eat it too https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton), and Python better than PHP, and PHP better than JS. Just like not all static type systems are C, not all dynamic type systems are JS. Untyped langs like assembly or Forth are interesting but I don't have enough experience.
I don't find the argument that valuable though, since I think just focusing on dynamic vs static is one of the least interesting division points when comparing languages or practices, and if we're trading experience takes I think Clojure's immutable-by-default prevents more bugs than any statically typed language that is mutable by default. It's not exactly a low cost intervention though, and when you really need to optimize you'll be encouraged by the profiler to replace some things with Java native arrays and so on. I don't think changing to static types would make a quality difference (especially when things like spec exist to get many of the same or more benefits) and would also not be a low cost intervention.
Last quip to reflect on. "What's true of every bug found in the field? ... It passed the type checker. ... It passed all the tests. Okay. So now what do you do? Right? I think we're in this world I'd like to call guardrail programming. Right? It's really sad. We're like: I can make change because I have tests. Who does that? Who drives their car around banging against the guardrail saying, "Whoa! I'm glad I've got these guardrails because I'd never make it to the show on time."" --Rich Hickey (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/)
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Compiler Development: Rust or OCaml?
> Lisps can be very flexible, but they usually lack static type safety, opening a wide and horrible door to run-time errors.
People should do basic research before writing something silly like this. Qualifying your statement with 'usually' is just a chicken sh*t approach. Common Lisp and Racket have optional strong typing, leaving the responsibility and choice to the developer. Common Lisp is great for implementing compilers. You also have thing like Typed Racket and Coalton. The latter is comletely statically typed ala MLTON
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Why Lisp?
Coalton doesn't actually work: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/issues/84?s=09
This is why it's important to always look at the issues on a repo instead of just believing what's in the README. It fails to detect type errors in some of the most basic situations
> static strong typing
Alright, here is it: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/
> small efficient native binaries
The numbers are: with SBCL's core-compression, a web app with dozens on dependencies will weight ±30 to 40MB. This includes the compiler, the debugger, etc. Without core compression, we reach ±150MB.
> The actor runtime?
the actor library: https://github.com/mdbergmann/cl-gserver
> couldn't find a way to make money with it. I suspect many other programmers are in my boat.
Alright. Some do, that's life. Yes, some companies go with CL even in 2023 (https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/lisp-interview-kina/, they released https://github.com/KinaKnowledge/juno-lang lately; Feetr (finance): https://twitter.com/feetr_io/status/1587182923911991303)
https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/
> Give us an HTTP (1.x & 2.0) and WebSockets libraries
How so? We have those libraries. HTTP/2: https://github.com/zellerin/http2/
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My Thoughts on OCaml
1. There are functional dependencies and multi-parameter type classes. No GADTs (yet?) or existential types (yet?).
2. Records are being implemented but it's far from being a dealbreaker, in the sense that thousands of production lines of Coalton have been built without needing them. It's just not ergonomic to shuffle around and pattern match against record-like data. With pattern matching in function arguments, things are at least easier.
3. All Coalton functions compile to Lisp functions. There's a guide that describes what is promised about interop (https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/blob/main/docs/coalt...).
4. Since Coalton functions are Lisp functions, you can call (unconstrained) functions directly. However there's a lot of room for improvement. There's an open issue to make a dedicated Coalton REPL that can show types and not require COALTON to be typed.
5. Coalton is developed as an open source project to build tools at HRL Laboratories, so it does receive sponsorship. Yes, HRL is hiring. Feel free to send me an email to the address in my profile.
Coalton [1] is a dialect of ML with S-expression syntax and integrates into Common Lisp. It works, and is used "in production" by its developers, but it's still being developed into a 1.0 product.
Coalton made a lot of design decisions that resonate with this post.
- Coalton dispensed with structures, signatures, and functors. No doubt a beautiful concept, and sometimes satisfying to write, but almost always unsatisfying to use. Like the author suggests, the "interface-style" of type classes, traits, and interfaces have always felt more intuitive, and that different interfaces should require different types. Coalton uses type classes.
- Coalton has S-expression syntax. No indent rules. No precedence rules. No expression delimiters. All of the "tradition" of ML syntax is dispensed with into something that is a lot easier to write.
- It should be no surprise that with S-expressions, you get Lisp-style macros. Macros in Coalton are just Common Lisp macros. No separate pre-processors. No additional language semantics to deal with.
- Because it's built on Common Lisp, Coalton gets something few (if any?) other ML-derivatives get: Truly incremental and interactive development. You can re-compile types, functions, etc. and try them out immediately. There's no separate "interpreter mode"; just a Lisp REPL.
Coalton's language features are still settling (e.g., records are being implemented) and the standard library [2] is still evolving. However, it's been used for "serious" applications, like implementing a compiler module for quantum programs [3].
[1] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton
[2] https://coalton-lang.github.io/reference/
[3] https://coalton-lang.github.io/20220906-quantum-compiler/
What are some alternatives?
Carp - A statically typed lisp, without a GC, for real-time applications.
portacle - A portable common lisp development environment
julia - The Julia Programming Language
Fennel - Lua Lisp Language
hackett - WIP implementation of a Haskell-like Lisp in Racket
paip-lisp - Lisp code for the textbook "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming"
racket - The Racket repository
phel-lang - Phel is a functional programming language that compiles to PHP. A Lisp dialect inspired by Clojure and Janet.
cl-cookbook - The Common Lisp Cookbook
rakudo - 🦋 Rakudo – Raku on MoarVM, JVM, and JS
kandria - A post-apocalyptic actionRPG. Now on Steam!
awesome-cl - A curated list of awesome Common Lisp frameworks, libraries and other shiny stuff.