What would be a good project to showcase the strengths of Lisp, versus other well-known languages?
How/why do people end up learning Lisp, what is the usual route to entry?
Genuine questions, not trying to start a language battle here. I've never used Lisp before so am curious about all of this. To me it feels like one of those exotic old-school languages like Erlang or Perl.
I started learning CL starting around July/Aug 2022. How I got here is close to 2 years ago I read a blog post (I think) that said learning a niche language can help land a high paying part-time job, or, if applying to a position where said niche language is used you don't have to jump through all the Leet code, typical interview circus. Just knowing the language and having an interest was a huge factor in getting hired. It seemed fairly plausible to me.
Initially I started learning Clojure but kept reading stuff about how awesome CL was/is. The JVM kind of turned me off and I like compiled, stand alone applications which can be had in CL.
So here I am really enjoying learning CL. I am in a job/organization that does not use CL and probably never will. The benefits are awesome so I have no plans on leaving anytime soon. Maybe one day I may try to land a part time job using CL but I'm no where ready for that (both in my lack of CL knowledge and lack of time to commit to a part time job).
But please don't assume this is an exhaustive list, and please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and Ecommerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list. Common Lisp really is a general language capable of a lot more than these few incidental application areas, even if this web page doesn't totally bring that out.
Now I have my interactive programming with the nicety of having SBCL warn me when I'm passing an integer to a function that expects a string or something like that. Not only does it help me make fewer mistakes while programming, the type declarations also help SBCL generate more efficient code. It's a win-win all around.
I'm holding onto some things that make common lisp look exciting and useful (static typing[0], APL DSL[1], speed [2,3,4]) and really want to get familiar with structural editing [5]
[0] https://github.com/phantomics/april [1] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ [2] https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-... [3] https://github.com/fukamachi/woo/blob/master/benchmark.md [4] https://tapoueh.org/blog/2014/05/why-is-pgloader-so-much-fas... [5] https://github.com/drym-org/symex.el
If you consider Clojure a Lisp then I think before the tech stocks crashed there were seven unicorns built with Clojure. Banking, healthcare, analytics, ...
I'd say Clojure can be used anywhere Java can for sure. And Clojure runs on top of ClojureScript too.
Then Clojure is only one of the Lisp dialects and there are "lispier lisps" out there which also their success stories.
Here's an overview for 2022: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/these-years-in-common-li...
companies: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/
pgloader went from Python to CL: https://tapoueh.org/blog/2014/05/why-is-pgloader-so-much-fas...
my take on why lisp vs python: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/pythonvslisp/
If you count Clojure and ClojureScript as kind of Lisp then for instance our whole product (https://orgpad.com) backend and frontend is written in it. Of course there is also some SQL, CSS etc. in between but basically all the meat is in CLJ or CLJS.