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Comment by pchristensen | Hacker News Reader

That's around when Clojure passed CL and started drawing interest away from it.

But if you look at Clojure libraries, some of them were last updated in 2012. That's because clojure solves problems (& it's not that the maintainers have disappeared) :)

Passed CL in buzz & hype, no doubt, but certainly not in power & suitability for large projects.

A funny thing is: A typical response from CLers to this type of comment is "yes CL can handle large projects". There is a definition gap, though, where one imagines a project that is "large as in a company", i.e. a large project that involves many people, while another imagine that is "large as in a system", a project with a large SLOC. And they are sometimes mixed.

CL can handle a large SLOC, as evidenced by the fact that the huge compiler such as SBCL itself is written in CL. But it won't be as popular as Java or C++ are, so it would become a problem when CL faces a project which is "large as in company".

Blub Advocate: CL isn't suited for the enterprise! Have you ever seen a CL project scale to a team of 100 developers?

CLer: Your language isn't suited for the enterprise. You need a hundred developers to do what we do with five.

SBCL is not really that large in LOC, though it has some complexity. It's a mid-sized Lisp program with some complexity, since it implements a type inferencing native compiler with backends for various platforms. SBCL itself was derived and simplified from the CMUCL implementation.

There are some CL code bases with millions of lines. But even a million line in todays terms is not much for some companies which are using other languages. If we look back, the operating system and basic environment (GUI, IDE, basic apps) of the Lisp Machine OS was around 500 kloc. Later versions with more stuff and some applications were nearing 2 Mloc. The commercial CL companies (Franz, Harlequin/LispWorks, Lucid, Xerox, TI, LMI, Apple, Goldhill, DEC, ...) usually should have developed code bases with +1MLOC already in the 80s / early 90s. Some Common Lisp based CAD software was/is in the range of 5-10 MLoc. Some application code might be much larger. For example Boeing has whole jet aircrafts designed in Lisp using the now discontinued iCAD application.

> so it would become a problem when CL faces a project which is "large as in company".

Common Lisp has been used in environments with up to 300 developers. This is not really a large number, but a larger number of what people typically think of a Lisp project. Symbolics, the Lisp Machine company, had at max 1000 employees - with probably a third of that software developers. Lucent developed network switches in the 80s/90s with 100+ Lisp developers. ITA was developing their flight search engine with a 100+ team with a lot Lisp developers. There are also smaller companies with a long history - for example Cyc is being developed using Lisp since thirty years.

One problem was/is finding these people. An old saying was that there were more Lisp Machines than developers able to use them. Today it would be even more of a problem, since the number of interesting Lisp projects at universities is smaller than what we had in the 80s/90s. Thus fewer students get in contact.

Probably a good idea to visit the European Lisp Symposium in Brussels, April 2017. Meet some fellow Lisp users from academia, industry, ...

http://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/editions/2017/

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