defstar VS awesome-lisp-companies

there is also https://github.com/lisp-maintainers/defstar for providing more ergonomic type declarations inline in definitions

And this is another thing I'm not sure how to explain, I thought CL is surely more verbose and ugly than python for small scripts, but maybe it's macros will make it cleaner for building large systems. But then when I started writing actual programs, even small programs without any of my own macros, I generally use about 30% less LoC than in python... I've thought about making sly/slime like support for python (built on ipython with autoreload extension) or ruby (with it's fairly new low-overhead debug gem). But at the end of the day support for these things will always be incomplete and a hack compared to CL where it was designed from the start to support it, they run 20-100x slower than CL, and imo their runtime metaprogramming is harder to reason about than CL which is mostly compile time metaprogramming. When I've had to dig into some CL library, which is a lot more often than in those languages because it has 10000x fewer users so of course I will be first to run into some issue, it has generally been easy to understand what is going on and fix it, compared to large codebases in other languages.

Regarding "modern type-safe language", languages with expressive type systems, rust, ocaml, haskell, typescript, etc, can give really confusing type errors, when you get into generics and traits and more expressive stuff. I'm not convinced it's a better development experience than a dynamically typed languages where values have simple types, and when you get a type error you see the actual contents of the variable that is the wrong type and state of the program, at least in the case of CL where the stack isn't unwound on error and runtime is kind of compile-time as you're running all code as you write it. But mostly this sort of interactive development is very hard to implement in static languages, I'm not aware of any that does it. For example even in static langs like ocaml that have a repl through a bytecode interpreter, simple things don't work like say you pass some function as an event handler, and then update the function. As you passed efectively a function pointer to the old definition, rather than a symbol name like lisp, it will be calling the original function not the new version. But the main issue is that efficient staticly typed languages the type system is all at compile time, type information doesn't exist at runtime, which is great for performance, but means you don't get the ability to introspect on your running program like you do in CL and elixir, which personally I value more than full compile-time type checking.

Would I like some new language or heavy modification of existing language runtime that provides the best of everything? of course, but I also realize that it's a huge amount of work and won't happen with 10 years, while I can have a nice experience hacking away in CL and emacs right now. And ultimately CL is an extremely flexible language and I think it'll be less work to build on CL than to provide a CL like runtime for some other language. For example projects really pushing the edge there is Coalton described above. While personally I prefer dynamicly typed for general application programming I think Coalton could be great for compilers, parsing some protocol, or writing some subparts of your program in. And vernacular (https://github.com/ruricolist/vernacular) which explores bringing racket's lang and macro system to CL. For more standard CL code, using extremely common and widely used libraries like alexandria, serapeum, trivia, etc, already makes CL into a fairly modern and ergonomic language to write.

> both are dynamic languages with types added later in?

Common Lisp has always had types and type declarations (e.g. `the` in the hyperspec[1]) as it's part of the specification. It was not added later as far as I know.

However, `declaim` and `declare` were left very underspecified so they tend to be very implementation-specific, though there are libraries that make types more portable[2][3].

[1] http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/s_the....

[2] https://github.com/lisp-maintainers/defstar

[3] https://github.com/ruricolist/serapeum/blob/master/REFERENCE...

Like defstar? https://github.com/lisp-maintainers/defstar Type declarations that you can place inside the defun. Also serapeum:-> (atop the defun). Or Coalton: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ But it's possible you'll feel much less a need for that in CL.

Hi, if you plan to work on enhancing the library (glad to here!): you can fork the repository to your github username, decide that you will be able to maintain for the foreseeable future and ask Quicklisp to point defstrar to your repository. You can create a defstar org on github, so you could easily give push access to future maintainers. Or, you could ask for write access here: https://github.com/lisp-maintainers/defstar it's an un-official org that I created in the hope to maintain orphan projects collectively. You can send PRs or ask for push access. There is no current maintainer for this project, it is not pointed to by QL, it is only a Github mirror. Best,

agreed^^ there are macros and libraries to bring a nicer syntax (of course). Exple: https://github.com/lisp-maintainers/defstar

   (defun\* (sum -> real) ((a real) (b real))

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...).