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Comment by bitcharmer | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: who uses Lisp these days? Been in software dev industry for over 20 years. Never encountered a single project employing the language.

There must be some reason Lisp is so popular on HN.

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The author of this site and the founder of YC wrote Lisp books, and then a bunch of influential essays about Lisp (starting ~20 years ago):

http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html

This site is written in Arc, his first Lisp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28155134

Clojure is fairly popular on the JVM and the site you are on uses a lisp dialect named Arc.

Though not popular as an industrial language, ideas from lisp have spread into javascript and front end dev

- Professionally, much of my output is in Python--everyone else in the shop knows it--with a smattering of C when it's warranted. That said, I'm an Emacs user, and I do write libraries and custom modes in Elisp to do things I find useful. In the hopes that others will, too, I make them available to my colleagues.

- I use Common Lisp at home for personal projects when shell scripts no longer cut it. When the Python 3 storm hit my ~/bin, it occurred to me that one of CL's best features is that its specification has been stable for several years (even while the ecosystem has evolved considerably).

> its specification has been stable for several years

And by "several", you mean "at least fifteen at the time"? ;)

Grammarly uses it for many of their services.: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p...

Pathway Tools is a genetic database search/comparison tool (I think, it's a bit over my head) and powers the https://biocyc.org/ website.

Both are pretty typical use cases. Back-end services dealing with heavy symbolic manipulations. I think the most common use of Lisp is to implement Lisp though. ;)

Just to add an example, there is a Portuguese company called SISCOG which produces planning software in (Common) Lisp, mainly for railway timetables, powering many European railway systems.

You are, indirectly, by posting on hacker news...

I've seen some self reported “lisp pros” working every day on lisp projects, but they are pretty rare compared to c++/javascript/python/c# programmers. It usually sounds like they are senior people who get their choice of languages and/or consultants who write and maintain very custom stuff with long-term, loyal customers.

The scripting language for Halo 1/2/3/ODST/Reach were based on Lisp. Halo 4 kept a similar syntax but got rid of the parentheses to be more BASIC-like. Halo 5 and now Infinite moved on completely to Lua.

Halo 1 reference: https://andrew.gg/scripts/00reference.html

Decompiled campaign scripts: https://github.com/Nibre/blamscript/blob/master/blamscript/h...

> There must be some reason Lisp is so popular on HN.

sicp is a really good book, but also: https://marktarver.com/bipolar.html

> Been in software dev industry for over 20 years. Never encountered a single project employing the language.

Are you saying you've never seen AutoCAD or Emacs in your life? While possible, I find it somewhat difficult to believe.

This gets posted to HN every so often: https://common-lisp.net/lisp-companies

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