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by brunjact 2879 days ago
SISCOG [1] uses on all their products. Actually they use Allegro CL from Franz. [2]

The main reason (for still using it) being that it all started out as an end of college project, by the two CEOs, around Artificial Intelligence proof-of-concept-general-tools (so to say) until the big breakthrough for danish railway company, NS, which was impressed with their fleet scheduling project. This adventure began in the late 80's and they were using Lisp Machines!

I suppose the reason for still using Lisp to be a mix of i. there is no technological necessity to change; ii. the codebase of existing products is too big to translate; iii. CTOs don't have enough knowledge on other technologies to evaluate the feasibility of a change; iv. many of the developers actually love Lisp :-).

Most of the support technology is also done in-house and they don't tend to use many external libraries.

1. http://siscog.eu/

2. https://franz.com/products/allegro-common-lisp/

1 comments

Planning and Scheduling is a domain where Lisp has historically seen a lot of applications. For example the planner for the use of the Hubble Space Telescope (and many other telescopes in space and on earth) was originally developed on TI Lisp Machines and later ported to Common Lisp on other platforms. Generally there were a bunch of Lisp-based planners for space operations (like payload planning for Space Shuttles or planner for mars operations). There were a bunch of Lisp-based planner application in military - with the most famous being the DART system - which was used for planning the logistics for the first gulf war and saved more money that the US had ever invested in AI research up to that point in the past 30 years. With field-deployed Common Lisp applications in the middle-east, talking to remote servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replannin...
Indeed. As for space exploration goes I don't remember if it was The Martian or Interstellar which mentions Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). And from there I found this nice article about Lisping at JPL, by Ron Garret [1]. I think it's an enjoyable reading.

1. http://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

Wow!!! I had no idea. Thanks for the link. :-)