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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

You claim that Lisp is not dead but is there any proof to that? I mean, beside the few posts on HN praising it.

I have encountered hundreds of software engineers over the years and literally not one has ever mentioned Lisp.

Could it be that Lisp is not dead because the people that started learning programming when it was popular are not dead?

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CL (and Scheme and Clojure) is still used in production, by Big Corps©, small companies, solo devs, for old projets or new ones.

https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

https://lisp-lang.org/success/

Google (ITA Software, used by travel search engines), Quantum Computing companies (HRL, Rigetti…), Ravenpack (big data analysis), SISCOG (metropolitan planning system), the ScoreCloud app (play your instrument, it writes the music score), Opus Modus (music composition), pgloader (from Python to CL), industrial-grade theorem prover, and so many more…

An interview with a small company: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/lisp-interview-kina/

(edit) another example, a nice tool and popular website made in CL: https://mathb.in/ & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32950465#32959255

I'm sure you can provide me a similar list if we replace Lisp with Cobold. But nobody would objectively claim that Cobold is not dead.

It's not because some companies have legacy projects or bad CTOs that the language is still actively used.

> But nobody would objectively claim that Cobold is not dead

As long as production legacy systems exist in Cobol which people actively maintain, you can't objectively say it's dead. You are either confused about what 'objectively' means, or what 'dead' means

That said, Cobol is not alive in the same sense that Lisp is alive. There are certainly new interesting Lisp projects being developed today :)

When talking about a real language like Latin, we say it's dead not when nobody speaks it, but when no one talks it natively.

To me a dead programming language is a language nobody uses to create new projects.

the two points are hard to take together since no one "talks" a programming language natively. the important point regarding lisp is that it offers a unique value proposition for programmers. it is for this very reason still kept alive by the very programmers (new and veterans) that realize its value. these programmers improve existing solutions as well as start new ones, including commercial/industrial applications

> Could it be that Lisp is not dead because the people that started learning programming when it was popular are not dead?

I think that this kind of questions is derived from some kind of ignorance of one mathematical principle. If some mathematical law is discovered - it works, no matter how many active users it has. Lisp will never be like Python 2 which is definitely dead by all measures. A word "Lisp" as a name of programming language does not even have a certain implementation because "Lisp" is not "Common Lisp" or "Lisp 1.5". The word "Lisp" is just an idea, an extremely rigorous mathematical idea, this kind of things will never die.

I work at a FAANG and use Common Lisp. Hsssh, don’t tell anyone :).

You can't just leave us hanging there! Tell us more. What type of problems do you solve with it? Was it hard to get others on board with the idea of CL? Are you happy with your decision of choosing CL for FAANG work? Any advantages/disadvantages you observed during your work?

Clojure is pretty sprightly, perhaps even prolific, surely. For example, if you're in any way interested in databases, you will have come across https://jepsen.io/ who do all their testing using Clojure.

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