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Comment by veddox | Hacker News Reader

My take-away points (and personal comments):

- CL is mostly used by hobbyists. (Not a very big surprise.)

- There do seem to be several users in research computing. (As a computational biologist, I find this interesting and encouraging.)

- The user demographics skew towards younger adults (<45 yrs). (That's interesting because they weren't around yet during Lisp's heyday, so the language seems to retain enough appeal to still attract new users.)

- User's top 5 countries of origin: USA (30%), Germany (10%), UK (5.4%), Japan (5%), Canada (4.3%). (Not quite as anglophone-leaning as I'd expected; there's actually a very wide spread of countries represented.)

However, I don't know how this survey was advertised, so the results may just be sampling bias.

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I've only seen this survey on r/lisp, so it's likely that only people involved in that community have answered.

> The user demographics skew towards younger adults

I'd be careful interpreting numbers like those. This isn't measuring the age demographics of CL users, per se. It's measuring the age demographics of people who responded to the survey. ~25% of that group self-reported as not actually being (current) lisp users.

That's what I meant with my reference to sampling bias.

I'm not calling attention to a sampling bias problem, I'm calling attention to a data reporting problem.

Including people who don't actively use lisp in the sample is entirely valid, and capturing that information about them would facilitate some interesting analyses. For example, we could look for demographic differences among professional lispers, hobbyist lispers, and curious onlookers. Or see if there are any industry trends.

It's just that this Google doc reports these data in a way that's too coarse-grained to support that kind of analysis, regardless of any bias concerns.

>However, I don't know how this survey was advertised, so the results may just be sampling bias.

I created this survey. I originally posted it to the CL subreddit and the CL IRC channel, so somewhat limited communication channels. Maybe there are other, better places to post it?

There's a list of Common Lisp resources on Xach's blog [1] that includes communities, which remains relevant despite being an old post.

Also, contacting one of the people associated with a blog listed on Planet Lisp [2] would ensure that it appears there and might be seen by a wide yet relevant audience.

[1] https://xach.livejournal.com/325276.html

[2] https://planet.lisp.org/

Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.lisp for sure.

That channel however is plagued by spam, robots and trolls, i.e. very low signal/noise ratio. I got the impression that many users/developers stick to mailing lists of the various projects/vendors.

With the decline in Usenet traffic, that's much less of a problem nowadays. I haven't seen any spam in comp.lang.lisp for the last 2 years at least. It's pretty much all signal, and mostly high quality too.

You must have some kind of spam filter. Of the 6 (six!) postings to comp.lang.lisp over the last week, half of them were some political anti-cryptocurrency campaing in Italian. But yes, a few years ago it was much worse.

It’s used a bit in quantum computing research.

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