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What would really help to persuade people that they'd be more productive in Lisp would be examples of software written in Lisp. I was a teenage Lisp enthusiast

by foldr 5y ago

What would really help to persuade people that they'd be more productive in Lisp would be examples of software written in Lisp. I was a teenage Lisp enthusiast and have seen these sorts of Lisp discussions go round and round in circles on online forums for the past couple of decades. Ultimately, the corpus of publicly available software written in Lisp just isn't that compelling. It's often said (and may be true, for all I know) that there are lots of companies quietly using Lisp behind the scenes and reaping the benefits without shouting about it. But to be persuaded, people need to see results of the claimed productivity gains in the form of actually existing software. It's also worth bearing in mind that there are lots of people (like me) who did give Lisp a serious try (Common Lisp in my case) and then moved on for various quite sensible reasons. Lisp enthusiasts sometimes speak as if anyone who doesn't love Lisp can't possibly have given it a thorough trying out, but I would question that assumption.

jmercouris 5y ago
Sure, here’s our personal example: https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt
didibus 5y ago
If you've tried it properly and didn't personally found it compelling that's ok. I've seen people for who their mental model of how they think and approach computer tasks doesn't land to it, or people who just have other personal preferences. As for example of software made with a Lisp, I feel people are never happy with them, like a constantly moving goal post, but there's a certain chicken and egg to it. Some examples: - HackerNews - Emacs - LispMachines (the entire OS) - AutoCad (uses Lips as a scripting language) - Jak and Daxter (the first game) - Yahoo Stores (pre-sale) - Reddit (pre-IPO) - Datomic (no-sql tuple DB) - The flight system in the Boeing 747 Next (their latest 747 as of this writing) - Apache Storm (the distributed stream processor) - Walmart (they use it for backend stuff) - CircleCI (build automation) - Riemann (a high scale distributed event stream publisher) - worldsingles network (bunch of dating websites) - NuBank (a Brazilian bank) - ConsumerReports (all their backend) - The Climate Corp (agriculture software) - Roam Research (note taking app) - Kevel (ad server as a service) - HighSpot (sales rep software) - Reify Health (health related software) Now those aren't all Common Lisp per-say, but Lisp languages so Arc, Common Lips, Scheme, Clojure, EmacsLisp, etc. There's also a lot of use of Lisp that's not like a closed software, a lot of times it'll be a backend service or parts of a system is using Lisp, I know Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix have some such use, it's not wide scale, but you'll find some teams there using some kind of Lisp, as you'll sometimes see job offers that mention it.

by foldr 5y ago

jmercouris 5y ago

Sure, here’s our personal example: https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt

didibus 5y ago

If you've tried it properly and didn't personally found it compelling that's ok. I've seen people for who their mental model of how they think and approach computer tasks doesn't land to it, or people who just have other personal preferences. As for example of software made with a Lisp, I feel people are never happy with them, like a constantly moving goal post, but there's a certain chicken and egg to it. Some examples: - HackerNews - Emacs - LispMachines (the entire OS) - AutoCad (uses Lips as a scripting language) - Jak and Daxter (the first game) - Yahoo Stores (pre-sale) - Reddit (pre-IPO) - Datomic (no-sql tuple DB) - The flight system in the Boeing 747 Next (their latest 747 as of this writing) - Apache Storm (the distributed stream processor) - Walmart (they use it for backend stuff) - CircleCI (build automation) - Riemann (a high scale distributed event stream publisher) - worldsingles network (bunch of dating websites) - NuBank (a Brazilian bank) - ConsumerReports (all their backend) - The Climate Corp (agriculture software) - Roam Research (note taking app) - Kevel (ad server as a service) - HighSpot (sales rep software) - Reify Health (health related software) Now those aren't all Common Lisp per-say, but Lisp languages so Arc, Common Lips, Scheme, Clojure, EmacsLisp, etc. There's also a lot of use of Lisp that's not like a closed software, a lot of times it'll be a backend service or parts of a system is using Lisp, I know Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix have some such use, it's not wide scale, but you'll find some teams there using some kind of Lisp, as you'll sometimes see job offers that mention it.