Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
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Alain Picar #1 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
Dear Lispers, The company at which I work is currently speaking with potential investors. These investors would like to know why we are using Lisp to implement our product, and, who else uses it, and for what applications. We have explained to them the technical advantages of Lisp (stability, programmer productivity, cross-platform development, etc) and while they appreciate these reasons, they wonder why they have not heard of anyone else using it.(*) So, what do you use Lisp for? Real life stories of successful systems built in Lisp would be greatly appreciated. I think this subject is of general interest, (I certainly wanted to know of such endeavours before *we* chose to go with Lisp) so post to the group if possible, but if not, anything you send me via e-mail will be considered confidential(*). Oh, I know about the lists maintained on www.franz.com, I am asking for your personal testimonials and estimation of how successful lisp has been as a choice of technology in your commercial endeavour. Alain Picard (*) My theory is that companies using Lisp keep it under wraps, because they consider it a strategic advantage (to outcompete the C++/Java crowd). That is why you cannot discuss this publicly, I assure you that any communications will be held in confidentiality. -- It would be difficult to construe Larry Wall, in article
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Wed, 06 Aug 2003 18:46:14 GMT |
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Fernando RodrĂgue #2 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
Quote: >Dear Lispers, >The company at which I work is currently speaking with >potential investors. These investors would like to know >why we are using Lisp to implement our product, and, >who else uses it, and for what applications.
Viaweb seems like a good example to convince investors. :-) //----------------------------------------------- // Fernando Rodriguez Romero // // frr at mindless dot com //------------------------------------------------
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Wed, 06 Aug 2003 23:44:31 GMT |
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David Bakhas #3 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
hey, I'm pretty sure that HotDispatch.com uses it. They have an awesome site -- one of those in the same class as guru.com, where they broker work. I believe they use MCL, and CL-HTTP. Please -- I've only heard this from at least two independent sources, so it should probably be verified. But I've used HotDispatch.com, and it's great. dave
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Thu, 07 Aug 2003 01:17:20 GMT |
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Andrew Cook #4 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
They seem to be hiring Java/Corba/XML people: http://corporate.hotdispatch.com/current-openings.html Quote:
> hey, > I'm pretty sure that HotDispatch.com uses it. They have an awesome > site -- one of those in the same class as guru.com, where they broker > work. I believe they use MCL, and CL-HTTP. Please -- I've only heard > this from at least two independent sources, so it should probably be > verified. But I've used HotDispatch.com, and it's great. > dave
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Thu, 07 Aug 2003 01:43:37 GMT |
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Sashank Var #5 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
[snip] Quote: >So, what do you use Lisp for? Real life stories of >successful systems built in Lisp would be greatly appreciated.
[snip] Carnegie Learning (http://www.carnegielearning.com/) develops and sells computer tutors for a variety of elementary, middle, and secondary school subjects. Their tutors and tutor development systems are an outgrowth of basic research done at Carnegie Mellon. Their systems have traditionally been built in Common Lisp, MCL initially and then Franz when they started developing for the PC platform. As I understand it, they have also been using Java of late. You should contact them for whatever details they're willing to provide. Sashank
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Thu, 07 Aug 2003 01:37:06 GMT |
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Eugene Zaikonniko #6 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
David> hey, I'm pretty sure that HotDispatch.com uses it. They have David> an awesome site -- one of those in the same class as guru.com, David> where they broker work. I believe they use MCL, and CL-HTTP. I heard they used Lispworks, CL-HTTP and Oracle as a database backend. I also head that they are about to move to Java (after all, HotDispatch is a Java zoo), and, considering that recently I observed Apache error message when connecting to there, probably they moved already. -- Eugene
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Thu, 07 Aug 2003 02:07:40 GMT |
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Andrew Cook #7 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
So you use Lisp to get something working quickly, raise capital, and then spend the money paying people to ossify it in Java. But I'd only put the first half in the business plan ;-) Quote:
> David> hey, I'm pretty sure that HotDispatch.com uses it. They have > David> an awesome site -- one of those in the same class as guru.com, > David> where they broker work. I believe they use MCL, and CL-HTTP. > I heard they used Lispworks, CL-HTTP and Oracle as a database > backend. I also head that they are about to move to Java (after all, > HotDispatch is a Java zoo), and, considering that recently I observed > Apache error message when connecting to there, probably they moved > already. > -- > Eugene
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Thu, 07 Aug 2003 03:32:03 GMT |
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ape.. #8 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
Quote:
>Dear Lispers, >The company at which I work is currently speaking with >potential investors. These investors would like to know >why we are using Lisp to implement our product, and, >who else uses it, and for what applications. >We have explained to them the technical advantages of Lisp >(stability, programmer productivity, cross-platform development, etc) >and while they appreciate these reasons, they wonder why they >have not heard of anyone else using it.(*) >So, what do you use Lisp for? Real life stories of >successful systems built in Lisp would be greatly appreciated. >I think this subject is of general interest, (I certainly wanted to >know of such endeavours before *we* chose to go with Lisp) so post to >the group if possible, but if not, anything you send me via e-mail >will be considered confidential(*). >Oh, I know about the lists maintained on www.franz.com, >I am asking for your personal testimonials and estimation >of how successful lisp has been as a choice of technology >in your commercial endeavour. > Alain Picard >(*) My theory is that companies using Lisp keep it under wraps, > because they consider it a strategic advantage (to outcompete > the C++/Java crowd). That is why you cannot discuss this publicly, > I assure you that any communications will be held in confidentiality. >-- >It would be difficult to construe Larry Wall, in article
Yahoo!Stores is built in Lisp CommerceOne uses it in one aspect of their business You will find others at http://www.lisp.org http://www.franz.com etc. Alex ----- Posted via NewsOne.Net: Free (anonymous) Usenet News via the Web ----- http://newsone.net/ -- Free reading and anonymous posting to 60,000+ groups NewsOne.Net prohibits users from posting spam. If this or other posts
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Thu, 07 Aug 2003 05:15:29 GMT |
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Kent M Pitma #9 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
Quote:
> (*) My theory is that companies using Lisp keep it under wraps, > because they consider it a strategic advantage (to outcompete > the C++/Java crowd). That is why you cannot discuss this publicly, > I assure you that any communications will be held in confidentiality.
They also keep it under wraps because it got some inappropriately bad press back in the mid to late 1980's (the beginning of the so-called "AI Winter", when the every-three-year cycle of rampant investing in the latest cool thing shifted from AI to other endeavors, like flashy graphics). Some management failures (e.g., at MCC) were blamed on the choice of Lisp as a programming language. (I said then and I still think now, "Oh, right. If only they'd done that large AI project in C++, it'd be winning away now. Ha!" I seriously doubt the language was the reason for whatever failures, but it became fashionable for various failing AI projects to blame their failure on Lisp.) I think vendors (possibly even legitimately) fear that their customers will get weirded out by the presence of Lisp inside, and so simply choose not to mention it. (I'm not saying the customer fear is based in something solid, just that it's a real fear, and that can still affect sales..) Add to this the fact that Lisp has a Large Footprint(TM). That is, it takes up MANY megabytes. I say "(TM)" to underscore the fact that there are some factoids (or false-oids) that get enshrined as lemmas and not re-evaluated with time. Lisp WAS big back in the early 90's but it so panicked customers that Lisp images have hardly grown in size for the last decade. During the same interval, every release of every other language has grown by leaps and bounds. A Lisp image is now competitive with, and often tiny, compared to images of other languages. The difference is often a distribution of .dll's that make it hard to see the size of the other things. And even there, the commercial vendors have dll solutions that do similar tricks. So this is just a myth perpetuated by people not going back to find out what the real truth is. And, finally, some people use Lisp for prototyping and then deploy in some other language. This isn't to say the other language could have been used at all to evolve the concept. And Lisp rarely gets the benefit of any noise about that. People mostly chalk this up to "Lisp didn't make the grade and had to be replaced at the last minute" but it often isn't about that at all. It's pretty plain that Lisp is not a "commodity" language; there are more programmers out there for Java or C++, and they are cheaper--as are all things that are bought in a mass market fashion. If Lisp programmers were as plentiful as Java or C++ programmers, they might be as cheap, too. But a lot of it comes down to what a job shop will tolerate. And if a company buy's another's technology, it may insist on a refitting of the product into another language "just for good measure". I do think ultimately that language choice should be a private matter and that the vendors should work as hard as possible to reduce the places where the choice of language matters. Often it does become an all-or-nothing thing, either to allow programmers to mix around or because two modules in the wrong languages won't connect. And that ends up with people making "C++ shops" or "Java shops", eschewing all else. That's a pity. Btw, in the space of material to convince someone of Lisp's technical value, if you haven't seen my Lisp Pointers article on why Lisp is good for Rapid Prototyping, I think it's at: http://world.std.com/~pitman/PS/Hindsight.html
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Thu, 07 Aug 2003 08:15:37 GMT |
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Paolo Amoros #10 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
Quote: > potential investors. These investors would like to know > why we are using Lisp to implement our product, and, > who else uses it, and for what applications. [...] > Oh, I know about the lists maintained on www.franz.com,
I can offer you just another list, sorry. You might have a look at the industrial applications section of the Association of Lisp Users site. I recently submitted a few tens of new entries to the section maintainer, I don't know whether they have been included. Quote: > I am asking for your personal testimonials and estimation > of how successful lisp has been as a choice of technology > in your commercial endeavour.
The proceedings of recent Lisp conferences may be a good starting point. Contact Franz to get copies. Paolo -- EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/
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Thu, 07 Aug 2003 21:15:07 GMT |
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Tim Bradsha #11 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
Quote: > It's pretty plain that Lisp is not > a "commodity" language; there are more programmers out there for Java > or C++, and they are cheaper--as are all things that are bought in a > mass market fashion. If Lisp programmers were as plentiful as Java or > C++ programmers, they might be as cheap, too. But a lot of it comes > down to what a job shop will tolerate. And if a company buy's > another's technology, it may insist on a refitting of the product into > another language "just for good measure".
I think there are other points about this -- lisp programmers are *seriously* hard to find, and often when you do find one they turn out to be really ex-academics with an AI background who have a superb combination of cluelessness about producing maintainable & comprehensible code, arrogance about their ability, and often they just aren't very good programmers at all, because academia just doesn't think mundane craft skills like programming are in any way important. This leads to friction when trying to work with them because their heads are just so vast; they also produce terrible code, and here Lisp hurts you because it's possible to get Lisp systems to run which are so badly-written that they simply would not work at all in many other languages because they'd spend their entire life following dead pointers &c. So you end up with awful, marginally maintainable code, difficult programmers *and* huge problems hiring people, so you can get held to ransom by the people who produced the stuff. This is a bad situation. It's now being made worse for many people because -- I presume because the Lisp market is small and thus the lisp vendors can't afford to invest -- there's a serious shortage of Lisp systems which support the kind of hardware that people want to use. For instance there is, to my knowledge, no commercial system which supports the most common `enterprise' 64bit platform (Sun), and no commercial system which supports any multiprocessor system at all. This is really frightening to people with multithreaded applications whose data are creeping up towards the 2Gb/4Gb point. I guess this looks like several reasons not to use Lisp, and it really is, unfortunately. It would be nice to say that this all myth and lore, but I'm working for a client right now which is in this exact situation, and I've seen enough other people end up in this bad place that I think that it's a reasonably common scenario. Of course I'm only giving one side of the story here, there are a lot of good reasons *to* use Lisp too, and many of the problems I mention above can be resolved -- for instance it's pretty easy to train people to write reasonable Lisp if their brains haven't been rotted by too long in academia, so once you have one good Lisp person you can cultivate others, and so on. --tim
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Thu, 07 Aug 2003 21:36:23 GMT |
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Douglas T. Croshe #12 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
... Quote: > It's now being made worse for many people because -- I presume because > the Lisp market is small and thus the lisp vendors can't afford to > invest -- there's a serious shortage of Lisp systems which support the > kind of hardware that people want to use. For instance there is, to > my knowledge, no commercial system which supports the most common > `enterprise' 64bit platform (Sun), and no commercial system which > supports any multiprocessor system at all. This is really frightening > to people with multithreaded applications whose data are creeping up > towards the 2Gb/4Gb point.
Development of a multi-threaded implementation is underway. The immediate target is x86/linux. We are looking for a small number of developers that would be interested in evaluating and providing feedback on the implementation, so please contact me if interested. Regards Douglas Crosher Director Scieneer Pty Ltd Melbourne Australia
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Thu, 07 Aug 2003 22:56:25 GMT |
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Craig Brozefsk #13 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
Quote:
> I think there are other points about this -- lisp programmers are > *seriously* hard to find, and often when you do find one they turn > out to be really ex-academics with an AI background who have a > superb combination of cluelessness about producing maintainable & > comprehensible code, arrogance about their ability, and often they > just aren't very good programmers at all, because academia just > doesn't think mundane craft skills like programming are in any way > important.
My employer has gone thru several hiring rounds looking for Lisp programmers and we did not find them seriously hard to find. We actually didn't get any of the academics you talk about. Our core team is all non-AI people, in fact none of our current programmers have degrees in anything related to CompSci, most are musicians (I'm the exception) and in general it's a very craft oriented team. The two coders we hired as contractors to help us out had degrees, one was an experienced Lisp Machine hacker, and the other was a UofCHicago grad who was pretty much a lisp newbie but learned quick. --
In the rich man's house there is nowhere to spit but in his face -- Diogenes
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Fri, 08 Aug 2003 06:10:20 GMT |
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Tim Bradsha #14 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
Quote:
> My employer has gone thru several hiring rounds looking for Lisp > programmers and we did not find them seriously hard to find. We > actually didn't get any of the academics you talk about. Our core > team is all non-AI people, in fact none of our current programmers > have degrees in anything related to CompSci, most are musicians (I'm > the exception) and in general it's a very craft oriented team. The > two coders we hired as contractors to help us out had degrees, one was > an experienced Lisp Machine hacker, and the other was a UofCHicago > grad who was pretty much a lisp newbie but learned quick.
This may be a UK/US thing I guess. Certainly in the UK it's *very* hard to find anyone. --tim
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Fri, 08 Aug 2003 06:44:56 GMT |
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Joshua Boy #15 / 66
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Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted...
Quote:
> It's now being made worse for many people because -- I presume because > the Lisp market is small and thus the lisp vendors can't afford to > invest -- there's a serious shortage of Lisp systems which support the > kind of hardware that people want to use. For instance there is, to > my knowledge, no commercial system which supports the most common > `enterprise' 64bit platform (Sun), and no commercial system which > supports any multiprocessor system at all. This is really frightening > to people with multithreaded applications whose data are creeping up > towards the 2Gb/4Gb point.
What is the status of projects like CLISP, do they support SMP?
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Fri, 08 Aug 2003 10:27:19 GMT |
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