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Running Lisp in Production (2015)

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Re: Running Lisp in Production (2015)

#31

Post by gilesgate »

reaperducer wrote: post #27
gilesgate wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would seem as too much of a shot in the dark with questionable ROI for a non-technical (and probably even a technical) manager. From their perspective it would seem as the equivalent of introducing an inexperienced programmer into the team (as your Lisp experience will initially be understandably zero), and there wouldn't be anyone in the immediate vicinity to help with peer review or mentoring. Perhaps it would b…

I think it's worth a try. The company is organized into small teams, and the HR department places a big emphasis on people learning new skills. We have a big catalog of in-house classes that are scheduled and taught every month (or quarter, depending on the complexity) with the purpose of promoting personal and professional growth. While Lisp is not core to what I do, neither is cooking, yet the company gives us clas…

Definitely go for it, then, and try to do Common Lisp rather than anything else. You can always expand later to JVM-based Clojure, or indeed contract to Scheme, but it's good to start with the thing itself.

The world always needs more good Lisp programmers.

Re: Running Lisp in Production (2015)

#32

Post by eukaryote31 »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #8

Grammarly is essentially an opt-in keylogger for your browser. To put it generously, it is hilariously insecure by design. Furthermore, I don't believe that most of their users understand that the plugin "phones home" continuously to function. Hey, at least the developers get to tinker with fun languages while spying on people!

How long before Google acquires Grammarly for the data?

Re: Running Lisp in Production (2015)

#33

Post by Jach »

jonathankoren wrote: post #26
TurboHaskal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren’t many dynamic languages with that level of performance and maturity. Their problem wasn’t choosing Lisp, but not paying for ACL :)

Allegro is nice. It’s fast, and has a great development environment. I used it all the time years ago. I recently decided to screw around with Lisp again and have been using SBCL with Atom via the Slime plugin, but it’s not very good. I can’t evaluate functions from the editor, nor can I copy-paste multiline functions into the repl. It’s very frustrating.

Are you using the right slime plugin? I haven't tried it yet (I'm happy with vim+slimv) but I saw a thread on the CL subreddit last month that stated "atom-slime is now replaced by Slima which is more complete".

I've given Allegro a spin, and LispWorks too. I liked Allegro's UI better, but both just give off the "We designed our UI in the 90s, updated to the WinXP plastic chrome at one point in the early 2000s, and haven't touched it since!" vibe. It's just not very pleasant, especially with a big screen... I use Eclipse at work for my Java day job (IntelliJ is also an option but Eclipse is fine for me) and it makes me sad that its UX with all its clunkiness and compromises to be a mega plugin-extendable open source IDE still feels better than the IDEs that just need to support Lisp. If either Lisp company would offer a subscription license model similar to IntelliJ's along with even vague promises of modernizing the UX (like it's not a good sign when your product landing page literally still has a Windows XP screenshot http://www.lispworks.com/products/lispworks.html ) I'd start paying immediately, but I suspect most of their revenue is from the core Lisp image, their side products (I've heard AllegroGraph is amazing if you need that sort of thing), and various customer support contracts for not just the products but bespoke extensions / feature requests. That is to say, very little from the editor itself. Yeah you can always use their Lisp with emacs/slime but then part of the point is lost. ;)

Re: Running Lisp in Production (2015)

#34

Post by msla »

gilesgate wrote: post #6

Previous discussions from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16679963 (Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure, so it's nice to see large-scale Lisp success stories. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, as it's one of my two favourite languages (the other one being, of course , C). Edit: APL is a close third, but let's be realistic.

APL is the ITS of the programming world: Both are immensely powerful and quirky, and were designed by people with a real allergy to typing. It would be nice if there were an Open Source APL which was the equivalent of SBCL in terms of being the default and feature-complete implementation; it would also be nice if APL were elegant as opposed to merely terse.

Re: Running Lisp in Production (2015)

#35

Post by chrisperkins »

sli wrote: post #18
reaperducer wrote: post #12

Does anyone in the HN crowd know of any other brand-name orgs using Lisp?

Apple, eBay, Intuit, Oracle, and Red Hat (among many large and smaller-but-still-largish companies) use Clojure according to the Clojure site. https://clojure.org/community/companies

Another related link - https://clojure.org/community/success_stories

Re: Running Lisp in Production (2015)

#36

Post by methehack »

methehack wrote: post #30
jonathankoren wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allegro is nice. It’s fast, and has a great development environment. I used it all the time years ago. I recently decided to screw around with Lisp again and have been using SBCL with Atom via the Slime plugin, but it’s not very good. I can’t evaluate functions from the editor, nor can I copy-paste multiline functions into the repl. It’s very frustrating.

Assuming you don't want emacs, so... If you don't mind branching out Racket w/Dr Racket is zero setup and great fun w/great docs. If you go Clojure, many options that don't require setup (LightTable, maybe, e.g). If you want to stay common lisp, Lisp Works has a "personal" and "hobby" version of their IDE and that's free, zero setup, and a mature IDE.

Oh I guess my "assuming you don't want emacs, so..." was interpreted as a ding against emacs so I was downvoted...

I don't care about the downvote, but ftr, I a have been using emacs daily for about 25 years, spacemacs now, and love it. So there.

All I meant was that the OP I assumed knew about emacs and it's lisp history and was choosing Atom instead. The reason to do that would be learning curve, which I respect. Fair enough; I judge not. Just... you, know, for clarity.

Re: Running Lisp in Production (2015)

#37

Post by Throw_Away_4825 »

gilesgate wrote: post #6

Previous discussions from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16679963 (Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure, so it's nice to see large-scale Lisp success stories. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, as it's one of my two favourite languages (the other one being, of course , C). Edit: APL is a close third, but let's be realistic.

>(Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure

What? It gets exposure on the Internet all the time, while seemingly nearly no one uses it in production.

Edit: Just look at the end of [1]. They have exactly three examples.

Edit 2: They have more example in [2], but it is still pretty little.

[1] https://lisp-lang.org/

[2] https://lisp-lang.org/success/

Re: Running Lisp in Production (2015)

#38

Post by TurboHaskal »

Jach wrote: post #33
jonathankoren wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allegro is nice. It’s fast, and has a great development environment. I used it all the time years ago. I recently decided to screw around with Lisp again and have been using SBCL with Atom via the Slime plugin, but it’s not very good. I can’t evaluate functions from the editor, nor can I copy-paste multiline functions into the repl. It’s very frustrating.

Are you using the right slime plugin? I haven't tried it yet (I'm happy with vim+slimv) but I saw a thread on the CL subreddit last month that stated "atom-slime is now replaced by Slima which is more complete". I've given Allegro a spin, and LispWorks too. I liked Allegro's UI better, but both just give off the "We designed our UI in the 90s, updated to the WinXP plastic chrome at one point in the early 2000s, and h…

I personally cannot stand Allegro's IDE, but LispWorks looks like your regular native application on macOS and Windows. And since v7 it looks good on hi-res screens (sadly, the free version is stuck on the former major release, which is bad marketing IMHO).

It might not look as trendy as IntelliJ or VScode, but compared to stuff like Eclipse I'd say it does quite well.

Here's a screenshot on macOS https://i.imgur.com/ml4jlYB.png browsing some example code.

EDIT: A similar screenshot on Windows https://i.imgur.com/qkgIXhE.png

Re: Running Lisp in Production (2015)

#39

Post by Throw_Away_4825 »

AlexMoffat wrote: post #2

“but we value choice and freedom over rules and processes.” Who could argue with that? It can sound pretty defensive though, like we know we have a bunch of nearly random stuff that few people can really understand and manage but, hey, freedom. Lisp has always been interesting and there’s always one or two companies in any time interval that are successful, and wildly so, using it. It could also be as much skill, gre…

There are more companies being more successful using PHP.

Re: Running Lisp in Production (2015)

#40

Post by dang »

gilesgate wrote: post #6

Previous discussions from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16679963 (Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure, so it's nice to see large-scale Lisp success stories. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, as it's one of my two favourite languages (the other one being, of course , C). Edit: APL is a close third, but let's be realistic.

Also 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9785944
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