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Never been a lisp user, so don't take me as too dense while reading this. However;

  • What is lisp used for today?

I know there are several variants of the language in existence, at least one which will keep it alive commercially for a while longer (AutoLisp, VisualLisp - pretty big support from Autodesk)... But I don't meet everyday people using it. So if you could shed some light on the matter:

  • What is its primary target market nowadays?

And what do you believe its future will be?.. Will it become just another support language in few apps, or is it going somewhere?

Also, apart from "an editor whose name shall not be spoken";

  • What other apps keep it as a support language ?
Phil
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Rook
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    The question every CS student asks him/herself at some point or another :P – Boris Callens Apr 28 '09 at 07:05
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    Lisp is used in many applications, but mostly not the way CS students learn it. They use Lisp for basic CS concepts. Real Lisp software often looks different. More macros, more object-oriented, more imperative, lots of low-level stuff, ... The typical student might get the impression that Lisp has only lists as a data structure and that everything is made out of lists (alternatively out of functions). But that is not the case for real Lisp software. – Rainer Joswig Apr 28 '09 at 10:03
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    come on, its a very interesting topic. we shouldnt close it. if it doesnt fit here it should be transfered to the appropriate stack exchange – ghostCoder Jul 24 '13 at 12:50

11 Answers11

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The Lisp dialect Clojure seems to be growing in popularity - you might ask out at http://clojure.org/ in one of the forums to see what real-world apps people are building with it.

Don Branson
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One example from my lisp projects:

ShareBot: It downloads stock market data, analyses it and trades automatically. Credits money into my bank account every month!

Prabu
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Aircraft Design : http://www.piano.aero/

LispWorks lists several applications : http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html

Franz technologies are widely applicable : http://www.franz.com/

tmh
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I wanted to typeset some music last week, and the program with the best reputation (free or otherwise) seemed to be Lilypond. I was pleasantly surprised to see it's largely written in, and customizable with, Scheme.

Ken
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  • For further information about how Scheme is used in LilyPond, refer to http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.13/Documentation/extending/index – thSoft Feb 16 '10 at 11:46
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Mostly for configuring and extending Emacs!

*ducks*

StaxMan
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CoCreate Modeling, now CREO Elements/Direct Modeling, an extensive 3D CAD application uses Common Lisp as its extension language. AFAIK there are now 7M+ LOC in Common Lisp for that application. Actually Common Lisp is not only the extension language, but large parts of the application are written in Common Lisp (plus some C++).

Other than that Lisp is a family of diverse dialects with diverse implementations (Scheme, Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Visual Lisp, Clojure, Logo, ...) and several others.

Strengths are for example:

  • symbolic computing (Maxima, Reduce, Axiom, ACL2, ...)
  • AI, Semantic Web, ... (see the customer stories of Franz for some examples)
  • CAD (AutoCAD, CoCreate, and several others)
  • Music (OpenMusic, Common Music, PWGL, ...)
  • graphical applications (see the LispWorks customer stories for some examples)
  • development environments (Emacs and others)
  • Education (DrScheme, ...)
Rainer Joswig
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  • Interesting. Very interesting. I used CADDS on a daily basis, and yet I never heard of this one. Thanks for the tip ! – Rook Apr 27 '09 at 19:08
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Also see the topics of the International Lisp conference 2009. This should give you an impression what people are using Lisp for and what new ideas they are thinking about.

Rainer Joswig
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Seems to be existent in the job market

24 jobs on dice.

Filip Skakun
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Common Lisp isn't widely used in the field at all, but here is one of the most succesful applications I know of.

ITA Software: Airfare Shopping Engine and Franz lisp has a list of others.

justinhj
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Today lisp is used AI System where the sympolic Data explanation is used.Mainly Lisp is devloped by show the functioning of List. but it use as a symbolic representative language

Anuj
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It is used for anything ant everything that all other programming languages are used for, including web, games, internal applications, ...

Marko
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