Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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Unfortunately Lisp will never go beyond being a niche language in modern times.

As such, Clojure has the benefit of Java ecosystem in libraries, and with something like Cursive you get close enough to the old Lisp Machine like development workflow.

For me it is the most interesting language on the JVM, when not using Java.

Common Lisp is interesting, from historical point of view, there are still features that modern languages lack, Allegro and LispWorks are still around, however unless it is for having fun, it is even more niche nowadays.

Lisp inspired languages like Julia, or Wolfran Alpha, might have much bigger userbase nowadays.

Personally my biggest issue with Python is the whole adoption drama regarding JIT tooling, there is PyPy as the black swan, however not like all major Lisp implementations with AOT/JIT tooling as standard. Clojure can have something like that via JVM JIT and GraalVM/OpenJ9.

It's niche but used enough in the industry to give us tools like Coalton (https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/), used enough by hobbyists to give us nice new libraries (new TUI library: https://github.com/atgreen/cl-tuition/blob/master/examples/R...) and exceptionally good and fast open-source compilers (SBCL) (with a good bus factor and contributors from the industry, like Google), it has enough libraries to allow us to ship software to clients (web clients, web servers, web UIs (webview, webui), SQL libraries, etc). It's niche but the motivated developer can publish a game on Steam (Kandria).

(btw, ABCL has the benefit of Java libraries, for those interested)

Julia has its own issues (and isn't on par outside of scientific area).

I can also quote about 5 companies using Common Lisp in production, and there are enough paying customers to keep Allegro Common Lisp and Lispworks in business, yet that doesn't mean we are going back to the same amount of market presence as before the AI Winter event.

no that doesn't mean we are going back to the same market presence, indeed. Do we have or will we have a useful-enough market presence?

Here are some more companies: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ (only the ones we know about)

Now compare that list to the amount of companies using the top languages listed here,

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...

Hence my niche remark, naturally there are a few using it, otherwise Allegro and Lispworks would have filled for bankruptcy already.

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