Help me convince skeptics! Lisp success stories wanted... 
Author Message
 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



Wed, 06 Aug 2003 18:46:14 GMT  
 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
//------------------------------------------------



Wed, 06 Aug 2003 23:44:31 GMT  
 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



Thu, 07 Aug 2003 01:17:20 GMT  
 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



Thu, 07 Aug 2003 01:43:37 GMT  
 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



Thu, 07 Aug 2003 01:37:06 GMT  
 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



Thu, 07 Aug 2003 02:07:40 GMT  
 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



Thu, 07 Aug 2003 03:32:03 GMT  
 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

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Thu, 07 Aug 2003 05:15:29 GMT  
 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



Thu, 07 Aug 2003 08:15:37 GMT  
 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/



Thu, 07 Aug 2003 21:15:07 GMT  
 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



Thu, 07 Aug 2003 21:36:23 GMT  
 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



Thu, 07 Aug 2003 22:56:25 GMT  
 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



Fri, 08 Aug 2003 06:10:20 GMT  
 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



Fri, 08 Aug 2003 06:44:56 GMT  
 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?


Fri, 08 Aug 2003 10:27:19 GMT  
 
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