Ask HN: What was your road to Lisp? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What was your road to Lisp?

6 pointsduncan_bayne8 comments

I'm a veteran .NET developer (been using .NET since 1.0, currently working in .NET 4.0 / SL), with a few commercial RoR projects under my belt as well. I'm working as a contractor in Melbourne, Victoria & enjoying it.

However, I've been using Common Lisp for a few trivial projects lately (e.g. a web scraper) and think I'd like to get some serious CL experience. However, my normal process for finding work (LinkedIn, Seek, personal network) appears not well suited to finding Lisp gigs.

I have no problems finding openings in .NET & RoR, so I have a few theories as to why this might be:

* there simply aren't that many CL jobs out there, esp. in Australia

* CL is heavily used in specialist fields that don't advertise in the areas I know about

* CL is a 'secret weapon' typically employed by consultants to solve problems, rather than as a mainstream development platform

* CL is heavily used in small fields which tend to hire by word-of-mouth and personal recommendations

* there are commonly-used resources for finding CL jobs that I don't know about

However I have no real way of judging the truth, if any, of any of those theories.

So my question is: if you're a professional developer working primarily in Common Lisp, how did you get there? What was your road to hacking Lisp for a living?

[ I've also asked this question here: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/82053/what-was-your-road-to-lisp ... but I figure that HN is a more likely hangout for professional Lispers. ]

I know of one company where I live that exclusively hires CL developers. They're called Secure Outcomes, and I think they do something with fingerprint recognition. They are, however, the only company I've ever seen "in the wild" that uses CL. I don't know if there's a .NET equivalent to Clojure, but that might be an inroad for you. If you find anything, would you let me know? I'm in a similar boat except stuck in Java / Groovy land.

On a different note, would you mind if I pinged you some time to ask some ?'s about life in Australia? My wife and I are talking about places to emigrate, and Australia is very high on our list of desired places.

Certainly - I'm always keen to increase the ratio of geeks in Australia :-) My email address is dhgbayne@gmail.com.

If you'd like, & if you don't mind your questions being public, you could always put them together as an Ask HN? submission. If you do that, email me anyway, & I'll make sure to reply to your submission.

Hey, Duncan -

Thanks. I'm on vacation next week so I will have plenty of time to put something together. I'll shoot you an e-mail when I do.

Also, if you hear anything on Lisp gigs, please let me know! I am tired of explaining to folks I work with how annoying it is to have to fight a language when there are better alternatives out there.

Ditto. "But you wouldn't _have_ to have a separate language for UI markup if your base language was sufficiently powerful!" Mind you, in many cases the solution could be either Ruby or Lisp :-)

In terms of Lisp for .NET, there's DotLisp - http://dotlisp.sourceforge.net/dotlisp.htm - but the developer of that platform jumped ship to Clojure back in 2007.

http://lispjobs.wordpress.com/

Not that it gets a whole hell of a lot of postings.

Surely you've read PG's comments on why organisations go for Flub instead of Lisp? In my far too many years in IT I've even come across demand for APL programmers, but never Lisp. Managers don't get fired for demanding their team use C++, C#, Java or even Cobol. Lisp skills are not seen as a fungible resource.

Blub : Flub :: BLoop : FLooP?

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