I'll admit I don't think I've really noticed the presence of lisp online other than when people want to talk about lisp. Can someone share some practical examples of where lisp is being used? Maybe a popular open source project I never realised was written in a lisp family language?
Some companies still pick and use CL: Rigetti Computing (quantum computing), 3E (realtime aggregation and alerting engine of sustainable energy systems), OpusModus, an award-winning music composition software, ScoreCloud, an impressive speach-to-text music notation software, RavenPack (big data analytics provider for financial services), SISCOG (underground systems of many european capitals), Genworks (knowledge-based engineering),…
I have also just deployed a website to a client last week: it reads an existing DB and shows products to the user. Simple, effective. I can hot-reload it if I want, it's built-in (I just use the REPL, I can even install new dependencies without a restart).
I'd recommend giving Emacs a deep dive. That alone should be impressive enough, but if it doesn't satisfy you I'm not sure there are other projects that would.
More than one, if you look at it. Emacs is best viewed as a Emacs Lisp runtime that ships text editor as a default application ;). That's how it ends up with extensive outliner/productivity suite, e-mail/news client, file browser and a bunch of other applications within it, and a lot more of third-party one available in the built-in package manager.
For sure. But most people in technology, and even a large number of people adjacent, know of GDB and GIMP so I always use those as my examples of "lisp in the real world".
It's a little sad that it's declined so far. In a way, it's a victim of its own success--it's so easy to write a lisp system that literally dozens, if not hundreds, of variants sprang up. The community was divided, and it never quite came through.
IIRC, our fearless leader PG made his zillions using Lisp.
Maybe it declined for other reasons, but my impression was that the Lisp world was very splintered. I certainly can't think of any other example of a set of quite similar languages that's anywhere near as large.
The Xerox Dandelion and friends was a thing to behold. If you ever got to touch one, you never forgot it.
In my school, implementing a basic Lisp interpreter was part of a required class in the CS curriculum. (If it's not still, everywhere, well, then for shame.)
Yeah, production is something else entirely. By "easy", I mean that dozens if not hundreds of people were tempted to write their own slightly better Lisp. Many of those did reach a production-ish level. But then what? There was no flag to rally around--just lots and lots of niche systems.
I'm not sure. I think if the community had rallied around Common Lisp or Scheme, or maybe just those two, it might have ruled the world. It just didn't happen.
And I'm miserably sad about that. What do we have now? Elisp is great, but I can't build production on emacs. I'll look at Clojure, but I'm dubious. Python is kind of lispy, but has had its own destructive schism. And C++ marches on--somewhere buried in there is a mildly functional lisp, using the worst of all possible syntaxes.
I'd think a refreshed Common Lisp would still have a chance. It's a great language with some really solid open-source implementations, but it got standardized at the transition point in our industry, so the spec doesn't even consider (now-commonplace) things like threading or networking, while exposing you to some abstractions over systems died out.
The problems of CL wouldn't be unsurmountable if the community was larger, though. All the important stuff that wasn't standardized gets added by each implementation anyway, and then portability libraries get created that ensure consistent interface. But the state of most libraries is... rough at the edges. I contrast that with Clojure, with which I spent some months over the last two years. The library ecosystem (not Java-side, but Clojure-specific) is great, and a lot of care goes into it. I particularly remember being in awe of just how thorough Liberator is[0].
If you haven't heard of Clojure, you probably haven't listened to a Rich Hickey talk. They're worth it even if you don't use Clojure. "The Value of Values" and "Simple Made Easy" in particular.
