Pascal, perl, ASP, every ML, Fortran, Cobol, Eiffel, Modula, all "4GL" languages.
Cobol? Seriously, there are probably more Cobol programmers than there are Python programmers.
And C? Most of the world runs on C, and its irreplaceable language in a non desktop computer.
And you will be surprised how much Perl code is written everyday.
The root comment is talking about the fad of the year, the kind of a language web devs use as flavor of the year. The current ones are Javascript frameworks. In this case the 'fade' is just the web framework, that probably has less mind share and open source dev contributions.
(I did have C in there but edited it out. I don't think that's a dead language yet.)
Because Common Lisp is so easily extended, the ossification of the standard is actually a good thing. The stability of the standard means that code written 30 years ago will still work today. Feature updates aren't required, because any desired feature can be implemented in macros and imported as a library.
Perhaps the whole programming field is just a bunch of undead things. Sometimes a bunch of living things stumble upon the field, but they're soon infected...
But ML, Eiffel and Modula were never mainstream.
And Perl, Fortran, Cobol probably still have more programmers out there than Common Lisp has :)
Why is viaweb and ITA trotted out decade after decade? If CL is so awesome why isn't the world filled with awesome stuff implemented in CL?
(To be clear, IMHO it's a huge shame that more powerful languages like CL or Haskell aren't more popular)
http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html
The companies that use LISP don't talk about it much. I'm not saying secret weapon or anything either. I'm saying they seem to be among the set that just identifies something good for the business, buys/builds it, and solves business problems. They don't write articles about their programming language. What I will say is the small number of case studies on those two companies have much more interesting software than what's advertised for many stacks. The kinds of things people use it for corroborates the LISP advocates' claim it's a favorite for hardest, constantly-changing problems. It's more remarkable with Allegro since they charge royalties on top of the licensing with customers still buying their stuff.
>It's more remarkable with Allegro since they charge royalties on top of the licensing with customers still buying their stuff.
Do you mean that (apart from the licensing) they also charge a percentage of the revenue or profits that their customers make from products they develop using Allegro's products?
https://franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml
They aint cheap or simple with the licensing. People still are buying it, though.
Fortran 2008 is VERY different from FORTRAN 77.
I would also say Python 2 has "faded" or started to.
Faded doesn't mean it isn't used anymore. It mean it's retreated into a niche, and is no longer on the short list for new development, and no longer interesting to most developers.
Also, Python 2 sees and will probably see more production use than Lisp for at least a few more years :)