awesome-lisp-companies VS lumen

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...).

I agree! That’s actually not a jeer, it’s one of my main criticisms of lisp. You don’t need lists to have lisp. In many respects it works better without them; https://github.com/sctb/lumen proves it, since hash tables and arrays are the fundamental data structure. They have to be, because that’s the only way lumen can run in JS or Lua.

Every time I can’t delete the first element of a list in lisp (I.e. del x[0] in the python sense) I get annoyed with racket.

The reason I look past it is because the benefits are so good that they outweigh the annoyances. I wouldn’t trade it away.

Where h is the raw function for hyperapp, not a macro.

I'd intended to develop my own mini-lisp with the same syntax, but got sidetracked by other projects. Maybe someday I'll get back to it. (Currently, I'm deep in the weeds trying to learn how to write a dependent typed language that compiles to javascript.)

[0]: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

It wasn’t my idea, too. It was Scott Bell’s. I’m not sure if he thought of it or got it from somewhere else, but it’s shockingly effective.

If you want to try it out for yourself, give Lumen a spin: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

> What do you develop with Arc usually?

I try to use Arc for as much as possible. We wrote our TPU monitoring software in it: http://tensorfork.com/tpus

Eventually I became frustrated with Racket's FFI. So I eventually made my own arclike language called elflang: https://github.com/elflang/elf

... which itself is a fork of Lumen (https://github.com/sctb/lumen) by Scott Bell.

The performance is good enough to run a minecraft-style game engine: https://i.imgur.com/iyr0YrB.png which was satisfying.

Nowadays I've been trying to implement Bel, mostly for the challenge of it than for any practical reason.

> I like how the "html" and "css" part was embedded in that "news.arc" file. Do you think that VIM script will highlight and lint the "css" part of an "arc" file?

Nope. https://i.imgur.com/o9aUG6j.png

But it has one very important feature: it can properly highlight atstrings: https://i.imgur.com/wO4f742.png

It's probably hard to tell, but the "@(hexrep border-color*)" would normally be highlighted as if it were a string. Arc has a feature called atstrings, where you can use @foo to reference the enclosing variable "foo". It can also call functions, e.g. "The value of 1 plus 2 is @(+ 1 2)" will become "The value of 1 plus 2 is 3".

Not mine! That was all Scott Bell. It's forked from Lumen: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

But, I did make an interactive tutorial here: https://docs.ycombinator.lol/

If you have any questions about it, I'd be happy to answer. This stuff is pure fun mixed with a shot of professionalism.

For what it's worth, as someone with narcolepsy, I relate quite a lot to your chronic pain. (https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1392213804684038150) For me, it mostly translated into wandering aimlessly from job to job, since I thought no one would have me. I hope that you find your way -- there's nothing wrong at all with taking it slow and spending years on something that takes others a few months. Everyone is different, and it's all about the fun.

You could go the opposite route, and run Lisp in your favorite language. Here's a Lisp in JavaScript and Lua: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

Integration is easy because there's no integration. You can just call whatever functions you'd normally call.

Not at all. I've been thanking Scott for making lumen every thanksgiving for several years now. https://github.com/sctb/lumen

I just close the issue immediately after opening it. :)