Why does it feel like there’s more prose about lisp being written than lisp code? I swear there’s like 15 people writing Common Lisp — Nikodemus, Shirakumo, Stylewarning, Christian Schafmeister, Borodust, the ITA folks, and maybe 2 startups.
There are three commercial lisp companies that continue to exist selling CL platforms. They exist despite SBCL being faster. They even make stuff like tools to build iOS and Android apps in CL. They didn't invest the money building that that out for no reason.
The companies that use lisp don't tend to talk about it. For example, a company I worked for only talked about their Ruby/rails and javascript stuff publicly. It was only after I hired that I found out that the mission-critical core software was written in Common Lisp.
Probably because if you aren't paying that much attention to Lisp software, the almost 40 years of writing about Common Lisp will surface more so than the code and their authors. And a lot of code (millions of lines) isn't open and a lot is probably lost to time. Though it seems like you know about a handful of the current era superstars, yet you're forgetting or don't know about other superstars. And there's a long tail of less prolific developers. But sure, just comparing the open source stuff in Quicklisp, there's only about 2500 projects (vs 335k projects on PyPI), and the frequency of new stuff regardless of whether it shows up or not in quicklisp is slow enough that you could follow https://twitter.com/NewLispRepos/ and not have your timeline overwhelmed.
i am new to lisp in general and common lisp in particular. i will tell you the key reason why i will take my time to promote it on hn. for years i had large misconceptions about lisp: it is slow (in my case for numerical work), it is an academic language, the syntax is ugly unnatural and annoying. it was only by chance that i was (quite happily) proven completely wrong. so my rationale is that if there are people who are like i was then i will be happy to provide information about common lisp and perhaps something useful might come out of it
Perhaps I’m wrong, but my understanding is that it has a reputation for being able to build systems with significantly fewer LOC than most languages, without delving into APL-levels of obscurity.
My attempt at deadpan humor doesn’t work if that isn’t true, and I’m not qualified to make the argument since I’ve not used it professionally yet. I can say that picking up Clojure for fun has both reawakened my joy in programming and greatly informed how I write code in other languages. That tends to inspire prose.
That is because it is a little secret. It is a secret hidden in the open.
We program in C#, we program in swift, C and C++, but we continue using so much Lisp as I did 20 years ago or way more.
With Lisp you don't need to write only Lisp, you can write swift or any other language in Lisp, as we do.
When people ask what programming languages we use, even competitors, we just tell them. They don't listen.
They just can't really understand. They probably believe we use Lisp because we depend on obsolete technology because they are under the influence. The influence of snake oil salesman that want to sell them their new shiny language.
For them anything new is shiny and old means dusty because things degrade over time, but computer languages do not.
If competitors can't "get it", much better for us. They probably believe that we try to deceive them and that in reality we are using this new language-paradigm of the week that solves all the problems. Let them.
Lisp guys have nothing to sell you but probably the software they create. And if they have a powerful tool, they are not that interested on you knowing their secret.
> Lisp guys have nothing to sell you but probably the software they create. And if they have a powerful tool, they are not that interested on you knowing their secret.
This level of claim is indistinguishable from fiction.
> I really like the Common Lisp world. *I would like it to be more popular, but at the same time, it is a differentiator for us*.
they reached to us so we add Kina on awesome-lisp-companies. But how many more think the same? And still, they evidently put little effort in making CL more "popular", because they have no interest. They found enough open-source libraries, they work on a hard problem, they form their developers and operators in-house, they develop their own Lisp-like language for the browser… and they silently use the power of SBCL.
This, this right here is the attitude I’m referring to. From now on all I’m gonna say is “GitHub or GTFO.” Show me all this lisp you’re writing, or at least tell me the fantastic product you’ve built with it or GTFO.
