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What is lisp used for today and where do you think it's going?

Asked 2009-04-27T17:18:45.937
34

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 ?
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2 Answers

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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/

answered 2009-04-28T00:57:05.023
8

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, ...)
answered 2009-04-27T18:49:31.880

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