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Comment by abhinav22 | Hacker News Reader

Lisp is amazing. John McCarthy played an amazing role, but there were others too - eg Alonzo Church and the guys that later made Lisp what it is (Common Lisp), with a significant extra set of features including lexical scope.

For those who want to learn it - check out this short guide. Highly recommended language!:

https://github.com/ashok-khanna/common-lisp-by-example

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Lisp is amazing. John McCarthy played an amazing role

But in terms of real world production code it is barely a footnote whereas COBOL fills entire libraries.

So while it might be great there just isn’t a lot of examples to look at

Lisp as a language might be a footnote, but the ideas the language proposed were revolutionary. Recursion, REPL and even conditionals all came from Lisp (FORTRAN had a conditional entity at the time, but not what we'd recognise as a conditional today and I believe they later adopted Lisp-style conditionals anyway). IIRC, Lisp could be expressed in 5 small base functions defined in assembly, from which the entire language could be defined in turn, making it outrageously portable.

It's hard to understate how seminal Lisp was.

I can understand how the ideas are important and revolutionary, but they were then adopted/extended/reused in other languages that seem to have far surpassed lisp in recognition and pragmatic use. Why hasn't lisp reached the heights of usage of something like C++ or Javascript or Java if it's so popular with computer scientists?

It's an interesting question, and one I'm not old enough to answer properly. From what I can tell, lisp was popular up until the 80s, where it was heavily used in AI. Then there's a reference to an AI winter, where I suspect OO languages gained a lot of traction and lisp fell out of fashion.

It's hard to understate how seminal Lisp was.

I don’t disagree but the OP was asking for examples of production code to look at

Ah, but you missed my point :)

Maybe you aren't seeing Lisp itself in production code (although someone suggested Emacs which is Lisp), but you see it's ideas and influence in almost every language and program you'd find today. There's little bits of Lisp everywhere you look, even if you don't recognise it as Lisp.

Which is nice (and very true) but hardly useful when all you want is to look at some actually used lisp code. Emacs might be a good candidate for that.

How about this...

https://github.com/wting/hackernews

One example is Metabase, which turns out to be written in Clojure: https://github.com/metabase/metabase

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