On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 15:45 -0400, Patrick O'Keefe wrote: > I haven't thought about Lisp for about 40 years. > Just out of curiosity, is it actually used outside of academia? > Is it used at all outside of AI work?
Paul Graham's Viaweb, which became Yahoo Stores, was originally done in Common Lisp. A fair number of the Ycombinator startups (many of whom drank the Paul Graham Kool-Aid) are powered by Lisp. ITA Software does a lot of stuff in Lisp too. It may not be terribly common, no pun intended, but Lisp is recommended by enough people I respect so that there must be *something* there. Probably its main impediment is the problem of portability between implementations. A Common Lisp application is no more portable in general than a C program might be. There is no central place to get good Lisp libraries (c.f. CPAN) and package management can be maddening. I've been looking at Clojure recently, a Lisp-1 built for concurrency and FP, which runs in the JVM, and interoperates with Java libraries. Cool! It runs most everywhere (including under the Google AppEngine) and has access to a huge set of portable Java libraries. See http://clojure.org/ for a starting point. I've gotten it to run under z/OS with a little codepage patch, and when I get some spare time I'm going to see what use I can make out of Clojure and Kirk's JZOS toolkit. -- David Andrews A. Duda and Sons, Inc. [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
