shop3 VS awesome-lisp-companies

A lot has gone wrong in terms of achieving high adoption, but specifically about something going wrong with rallying around CL, I don't think anything went wrong. No more are Maclisp, Interlisp, Lisp Machine Lisp, Zetalisp, Franz Lisp, Portable Standard Lisp, Spice Lisp... They were all slain or subsumed by Common Lisp. (You might have seen Franz elsewhere in this thread; rather than continuing it Franz, Inc. just developed Allegro Common Lisp separately. Spice Lisp meanwhile changed to become a CL implementation, became CMUCL, which was later forked into the now most popular implementation SBCL.)

Le Lisp/ISLisp are interesting European competition that didn't fall in line, but I don't ever hear about them, I only know they exist/existed, they might nowadays be effectively dead for all I know. Emacs Lisp is probably the biggest success in not caving to CL. Not big enough to constitute anything "going wrong" though.

I think your perception is wrong in two ways. First is the idea that Scheme and Clojure are somehow "variants" or "dialects" of Lisp. Scheme was never a Lisp dialect, it was instead described as a "Lisp-like". Also notice neither Scheme nor Clojure even have "Lisp" in their name, unlike all those other languages that got eaten by CL. "Lisp" meant something, and "Common Lisp" unified that meaning and I think deserves to be synonymous with "Lisp"; many writers have treated it that way. But Common Lispers are giving up that fight, because it's tiresome but also an understandable confusion not helped by Scheme or Clojure's attempts at capitalizing on some primordial idea about the good name of Lisp or whatever drives them to associate with the term. (#lisp in Freenode used to be only for Common Lisp, now in Libera #lisp is for all Lisp-likes and CL has its own channel.) Anyway, Scheme and Clojure have happily had their own evolution and separate largely incompatible s-expressions. I don't think their continued existence is a flaw against CL any more than another random programming language would be. One aspect of Clojure that might sting a little is that its entire reason for existing was because the author couldn't win political fights about having CL in production instead of the JVM.

The second way I disagree with your perspective is on prevalence. Scheme has had some success in teaching (mostly thanks to SICP) though Common Lisp was/is also used similarly at various places, however I think that's hurt [Common] Lisp more than anything. (Basically CL gets taught like Scheme, and so whether CL or Scheme is used students come away thinking they "know Lisp" without ever really having seen its OOP power, its handling of types, its condition system, its easy-to-define macros, let alone the trivial things like LOOP or SETF that make imperative programming possible and easy. It's like C++ classes that teach it as C-with-classes, but worse.) Scheme has also had success as GNU's official extension language (with Guile, which goes a ways beyond standard Scheme to be useful) and you see Scheme pop up in places like GIMP plugins. Racket is the most successful modern Scheme, but it has gone waaaay beyond standard Scheme and slowly seems to be becoming as large as CL. Real stuff is made with it, not just education stuff, but I'm less familiar with what's going on. It may yet eat CL's lunch.

Clojure of course has been a rising star and has enjoyed a lot of success in real stuff. It's popular, it's fashionable, and in terms of projects-per-second your perception is probably right that it's more widely used than CL right now. Where I would draw disagreement is in total pound-for-pound code that's Out There. CL has the benefit of decades of existence, so for example https://www.ptc.com/en/products/creo/elements-direct has been developed for a long time and is made of several million lines of CL code, and that's just one project. If you only used "active" (i.e. someone executed it over last month) code perhaps there's enough Clojure out there now to be an interesting race though there's no way to really tell; if you allow for all the CL that has been written and is no longer run, I don't think there's any contest, CL has such a rich history. (A random application being Mirai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(software) with demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IRsYGfr4jo -- has there ever been a 3D modeling program written in Clojure? Will there ever be?)

https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies is an ongoing collection of companies known to be using CL. In terms of "industries", right now quantum computing companies seem particularly drawn to CL. Symbolic math historically also, with Maxima and Axiom being modern still-working/developed code bases. (The latter is a million lines of literate CL.)

But drawing on legacy again rather than last-few-years stuff, an old quote by Kent Pitman seems relevant: "Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list." We can of course add more things to the list if that would help, like Mars Rovers or video games, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9510945 has a few more, in recent news I learned about https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/osnsgz/intels_... and https://github.com/shop-planner/shop3 was open-sourced in 2019. Lisp is in a lot of places all over the world (it's had quite a legacy in Japan even), but not the most fashionable stuff, so it's also understandable that many people haven't heard about it, realized they're using it, or heard people talking about it.

here's an example from the shop3 planner which implements the macro's behavior in its expansion, rather than as a call-with- function:

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...).