Hacker News Reader

Comment by yvdriess | Hacker News Reader

Several languages seem to share this curse. You do see companies advertise it on language conferences or websites: Jane Street for OCaml, Remedy Entertainment for D-lang, Naughty Dog and ITA for Common Lisp. But you are often left wondering if it is the tip if the iceberg, or an accurate reflection of industry use. In the case of CL, you see multiple commercial implementations still being supported, indicating much more use than one would suspect from grepping github projects.

A pattern I seem to observe is that if the program/framework/platform grows large and successful enough, the company gets acquired for its tech and everything gets rewritten in some more 'industry standard' language.

edit: As pointed out, Jane Street advertises its OCaml use, not Haskell. Oops!

View on HN

Just a nitpick, but it's OCaml for Jane Street rather than Haskell.

Haskell is certainly used as a bit of a secret weapon in some of the Quant groups at banks like Barclays Capital though!

>ITA for Common Lisp.

>A pattern I seem to observe is that if the program/framework/platform grows large and successful enough, the company gets acquired for its tech and everything gets rewritten in some more 'industry standard' language.

I wonder if that happened for ITA's software after ITA was acquired by Google (for some hundreds of millions, IIRC).

I read somewhere that Paul Graham's ViaWeb, which was written in mainly Lisp (or at least some key parts were), was later rewritten in some other language, maybe C++, like the pattern you observe.

Probably it's not that easy to replace Lisp for something else at Google, since it implements a relatively complex search engine core. Thus it's still used. I guess they WOULD be happy to replace it, since Lisp is otherwise not used much at Google, AFAIK. ITA/Google also developed another complex application using Lisp (a reservation system for airlines, initially for Air Canada), but that wasn't successful in the market.

At Viaweb Lisp was used for an early web store maker (enables people to have their own webshop) implementation.

> company gets acquired for its tech

Actually companies get bought for a business model, customers and some amount of tech. Reimplementing earlier approaches, even multiple times, even multiple times with different technologies, seems to be normal in the web business.

>Probably it's not that easy to replace Lisp for something else at Google, since it implements a relatively complex search engine core. Thus it's still used.

Thanks, makes sense.

>At Viaweb Lisp was used for an early web store maker (enables people to have their own webshop) implementation.

Yes, I had read PG's article about it ("Beating the Averages"). IIRC the templating language they used in ViaWeb, which allowed customers to customize their stores, was a killer feature, and relied heavily on some Lisp language feature, maybe macros.

I’m nitpicking a bit, but Jane Street focuses on OCaml.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com