[quasi]

I am sure there are other success stories which are not heard. At Cleartrip we had a largish team of Common Lisp programers. We became from new entrant to a number 2 position with software written in Common Lisp. So many myths about lisp were proven plain wrong. * you need to be brilliant to write lisp - none of us were "super" lisp programers with years of experience. We had common sense and nice simple code. * hard to learn lisp - not any more than, say, ruby. Out of the 10 odd lispers we had only 2 had CL exposure. The rest learned on the go. Whichever language / platform you use you have to train your team if they are fresh. * Lisp is slow - haha. * Lisp software is hard to run - haha again. we had months of uptime and we could patch our servers on the go. * Lispers are pricks - We were all normal people who worked together well. Lispers, Ruby guys, JS guys - all.

But still everything was not rosy. * When we started, documentation was a huge problem. We would never have got approved except for Edi, who's efforts were an inspiration and a basis of our stuff. * Library support was sparse. Now it is a lot better. But the community is small. Not that they are all pricks, but they are stretched too thin. If I have seen anything, if they use lisp for work, most of them have to fight daily battles against the anti-lisp crowd which will not look rationally at any good work you have done. * Library management - now much better because of quicklisp (thanks Zach) * For most people lack of a usual ORM and a MVC framework was unthinkable. CLSQL has been a pain point.

Programming in the Lisp environment, with the REPL, is a pleasure. I have had to do php after than and O-M-G - its horrible. All I will say to other fellow Lispers - The naysayers are always present. Trust your instinct. You will enjoy life better if you are able to love what you do.

(Cleartrip does not run on CL now. Java, I think. Because of reasons other than technical IMHO.)