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 just realized now that Maxima, a program for symbolic algebra, is written in Common Lisp. I've been using that for quite some time and I think it's also a very good real life example.

Answer 2

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 :)

Answer 3

Franz, Inc. provides an inexhaustive list of success stories on their website. However:

Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list. — Kent Pitman

We can find other success stories here: http://lisp-lang.org/success/

and a list of current companies using Common Lisp: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies

Answer 4

Far from exhausted list in http://www.franz.com/success/all_customer_apps.lhtml

Answer 5

Lisp attempted the jump to lightspeed in the early 80's. Before there were PCs, there were commercially produced "Lisp Machines" which superficailly look a lot like modern workstations, but which were lisp "all the way down". Lisp hardware eventually lost out to Intel (as did everything else). Lisp software eventually lost out to C/C++. There are a variety of theories why this is all this is so. http://www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/lisp/

Answer 6

Does Emacs' elisp count? That's the most "real world" use that I am familiar with (although I'm not sure that Emacs counts as "real world" either).