OP didn't really make a point. He just said that he would like posts about lisp being used in production
> Also as an addendum to his point, what about projects being written in the last decade or two?
It's a nieche language so it's pretty pointless throwing lists of all CL projects in production at people. Instead I suggest you say what domain interests you and maybe someone who worked in your domain will be able to give a more meaningful response
+1. I am the OP that asked the question. I wasn't making a point. I was asking a question. The company list provided in the response to that was helpful.
BTW this one is the list they are based on: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/
See also
Lisp was a major programming language as it powered nearly all AI research for many many years and many of it's ideas have spread into languages we use today. For instance, it was the first language with a garbage collector !
It has many more or less direct descendents that are used
The fact it was created some 70 years ago, but still run nearly unchanged and has active users and project is an achievement.
I'm not saying it hasn't served its purpose, I'm just saying that the claim that it's not a dead language is wrong, and you seem to agree.
Well your claim is just simply false. People have clearly demonstrated to you that CL is used today in production
I'm sure a lot of websites are currently in production running on PHP 4. Is PHP 4 dead? Yes, it is.
I guess you need to define "dead".
I have to agree with others here that Lisp is not dead for the simple reason that Emacs is not dead. Emacs has a thriving community of developers who code and use Lisp almost everyday to solve problems.
Org-mode alone has a large number of users from all walks of life, from writers to event organizers and Lisp code is written for Org-mode everyday.
There are high-profile well known companies that use Clojure for processing high volume of transactions. They are in all probability writing Clojure code everyday that is going to production everyday.
What exactly is your definition of "dead"?
P.S. You have also completely misrepresented my earlier comment in your comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33464215 so I am not entirely sure if you are arguing here in good faith or if you have an axe to grind.
If a language is being widely used in specific existing 'legacy' projects and for people learning it to get a job in their maintenance (e.g. COBOL?), then I'd say it's dead. If during the last five years every organization considering what language to use for their new production system (as opposed to someone's toy project or learning project) chose something else, then that language apparently has no valid niche remaining and is effectively dead, being chosen only due to legacy/compatibility reasons.
Also, I'm not sure whether I'd equate Clojure with Lisp - I'd treat it as a separate language/ecosystem evolved from Lisp as it was commonly understood; I'd consider Clojure activity as evidence that "Lisp may be dead but its descendents live on".
> I'd consider Clojure activity as evidence that "Lisp may be dead but its descendents live on"
except that common/emacs lisp or scheme is certainly not dead by any measure lol
I don't think you know what 'dead' means
In 2015, Paris Airport Air Traffic Software were running on windows 3.1.
Is windows 3.1 outdated ? Yes. No longer a public facing product ? Yes.
Dead ? Absolutely not (at least back then, maybe it got decommissioned).
Around that time, a friend of mine was doing his master Thesis in an astronomy lab. He had to load fortran 77 routines from a 5" floppy disk that were doing critical computation (they were in the process of migrating). Same diagnosis: outdated, became a niche product, but not dead at all.
Are there new things being developed based on lisp?
The analogy is not very good.
No
> Are there new things being developed based on lisp?
Yes.
> The analogy is not very good.
I guess I am missing your point. Care to elaborate your point?
Put otherwise, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465597 says one could define “dead” in a way that Win 3.1 is dead but Lisp is not (not more than usual anyway).
https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co...
Which frankly amazes me. The game was released in 1998!
The only minor nit I can pick here is that most (all?) of these seem to be proprietary software where someone college student learning to program cannot easily contribute. But there are tons and tons of Go and Rust projects where college students can contribute. A similar list of open source projects written in Lisp can be very helpful too because that would mean I don't have to find an employment in one of these few companies to be able to contribute something useful with Lisp.
It didn't end in 1976, though.. it's creation continues to this day.
magit and org-mode are a couple of other killer apps written in lisp.
Legacy projects tend to reflect the state of the art of the time they started, which reflects on aspects such as software architecture, technologies, and more importantly the overall technical commitment and technical debt which makes it hard or practically impossible to fix past wrongs or replace subpar technologies with better options.
Emacs started out in a time when Lisp was the only game in town in terms of dynamic interpreted languages. That's perfectly fine. Would the same people stick with Lisp in a time when, say, the likes of Python and JavaScript and Node.js and Ruby and .NET exist?
If you have so few that you can maintain a list, it kinda proves OP's point.
Also as an addendum to his point, what about projects being written in the last decade or two?
Emacs is cool, but it was created in 1976...