Interestingly AutoCAD was originally written in lisp and a lot of the drawing objects are represented (or can be accessed) as lisp lists in AutoCAD's own lisp dialect (AutoLISP). It's pretty confusing for anyone not familiar with lisp though and fairly limited compared to other lisps (no macros, as far as I could tell, though I'm sure someone could probably find a way to implement them)
Autolisp was added to Autocad when it already existed. They took the free XLisp (written by David Betz in the early 80s) and integrated it into Autocad. The XLisp of that time was a small Lisp dialect written in C.
Some years ago the old Autolisp implementation was replaced with a different (but compatible) Lisp implementation, which Autodesk bought. That was then called Visual Lisp.
They did, but once you buy it, it's yours? The large companies buying up smaller ones are essentially funding the research and innovation.
That seems like the opposite of innovation to me.
"the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors."
Yes. And the worst thing Autodesk has done is try to inflict costs to this "connecting the dots" - namely, denying realDWG support for those they consider a strategic threat. Since there is Teigha this is not financially an unsurpassable problem but it's a pain in the ass for anyone who can't use realDWG.
Autodesk is in a position to wield leverage through DWG, they have the financial incentives to do so (and have done so) and for a company this is quite understandable.
Construction industry software is so ready for disruption.
A hint for any ambitious software engineers with a penchant for linear algebra - grab a few beers with some buddies who are trained construction engineers, ask to observe their work for a day with any software they are using, and observe how simple the principles underlying most CAD software is and how obnoxiously expensive and low quality most of such software is. Grab the construction engineer buddy, a computer graphics engineer and an applied mathematician. Start from a. performance b. quality c. shareability. Rule the market.
Auto desk are a vile company. A serial monopolist that make any of the othe offenders look tame. I'd love to see them go out of business. That said, I hope those that have lost their jobs find new ones soon.
I've got years of diverse experience in the field of architecture and software, and Revit seems like a very clever toy but not a substitute for endless labour over details. Good architects draw every brick (or equivalent), and/or they also work in close experimental collaboration with the people fabricating the building elements. I'm thinking in the first case of Caruso St. John http://www.carusostjohn.com/ drawing every brick and in the second of a practice like Grimshaw http://grimshaw-architects.com/ using lost-wax casting (investment casting) to make components. The trade or craft knowledge involved means there are effective constraints which cannot even be expressed in Revit (individual bricks are not really an option in Revit, and you definitely wouldn't want to design a metal casting using Revit... It's an Autocad job, or better, a job for something more expressive like Maya or Mudbox (or whatever it's called) or whatever tool suits your aesthetic. You can't get to Rodin from Autocad.)
I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations. I realize this was not a fair comment to current employees there - yes, the software suites are impressive and Autocad reseachers have produces very nice things. I would still categorize them as a huge corporation with vested interests rather than an innovator in themselves.
Now, offering stable products is a good thing for many people. Owning DWG gives them an underhanded advantage though, and slows down the evolution of computer assisted design as a discipline, IMO. The DWG situation weights more in the anti-innovation camp more than a hundred clever Maya plugins.
DWG is considered a "standard" while effectively it's just a black-box binary blob. The prevalence of the DWG format means that either new players in CAD need to licence the RealDWG suite from Autocad, they can use third party reverse-engineered libraries like Teigha or they can hack their own. Teigha has been at it with several hired developers for a decade and they still lack bug-free support for the format. The fun part? Autocad can very well deny RealDWG to anyone they don't like. How's that for a market space for disruption.
It's nice to see there are new things happening in CAD world like OnShape (https://www.onshape.com/) that is not yet bought by them :)