Lisp in the real world

Question

I have experimented with Lisp (actually Scheme) and found it to be a very beautiful language that I am interested in learning more about. However, it appears that Lisp is n

Answer 1

I see a few people have already mentioned it but lisp is widely used in custom Autocad development. Autocad includes a built-in lisp interpreter. It is one of the simplest ways to extend the product and provides the ability to quickly enhance your productivity.

No compiling is required, on the user side, and 1, or more, line lisp expressions can be entered on the command line and executed immediately on the drawing. For designers and draftsman willing to take even a small step to learning the basics of lisp it can provide a huge productivity boon.

Autocad does provide a number of other ways to customize their products; ObjectARX (C++), VB, C#, etc.. The lisp interface is by far the easiest to learn and implement. And the majority of other dev environments use lisp in some fashion.

The lisp interpreter was made available in a very early version of Autocad and was called Variables and expressions. It was fairly limited but was such a success with the users that additional functionality was quickly added. A full blown visual IDE was later on (in version 2000 I think).

I would hate to guess how many millions (billions?) of lines of lisp code are available for Autocad. A google search on "autocad .lsp" returns 2.3 million hits.

Ok, enough typing, it's back to work for me, writing more lisp for my current project :)