https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMVZLo1Ub7M
Siscog, company is 37 years old, 130 employees, 1.7 Million lines of Lisp code. In the planning/scheduling domain for railway companies.
Other example ITA Software, bought by Google for $700 Million dollar. 100+ Lisp developers.
This is really cool! Had not heard about them. Thanks!
Nice, so looks like low hundreds of developers may be possible given the right environment.
That said, I don't feel it disproves my impression. If the company is 37 years old, still privately held and still has less than a hundred developers then it is clearly not a company looking to grow fast above all else. So feels like a nurturing environment for Lisp.
They may also not need to. They may have enough people working in a productive environment. If you add a Lisp feature to a large code base, it may not take a lot of time to do so, given the possibility of an incremental development style with Lisp (-> changing running applications incrementally).
Not really. Lisp can be a power amplifier if you can keep it under control. But, as I've argued above, that limits you to a small stable team.
If I could start a new company with a few solid Lisp buddies and I knew that's going to be the core team for the next decade, I think I'd use Lisp and it would be a significant productivity gain.
But but but.. those are some unrealistic constraints. If I'm starting a company presumably I want the company to keep growing as much as possible, not stay with a few core people for years. So no, I wouldn't use Lisp.
> to have too many employees
All of them, the goal of both startups and public companies is to continuously grow. As soon as growth stops that is seen as a problem and the decline begins. The only exception is privately held companies who don't run on VC money and don't have any intention to become public. Those might be the best candidates for Lisp.
> to work slowly
No company specifically wants that, but they vastly prioritize being able to hire 10,000 scrum interchangeable cogs to do development and that's not the environment where Lisp works well.