| > If Lisp is [so] efficient for development, why are there essentially no commercial products that use it? I’m sorry you’ve been downvoted for asking this question, even if it was a rhetorical question. It’s easily the most important question to ask in the professional programming area, and it’s worth the effort to truly grok the answers rather than look up what everyone seems to say and then repeat it as gospel. It may be asked and answered ad nauseam, bit it’s worth answering in the context of the very article discussing the Lisp curse. Read TFA. What if every programmer rolling their own version of everything makes it an astoundingly good language for people but terrible for gaining industry-wide adoption? JavaScript had this problem with every framework implementing its own OOP. Ember.js comes to mind as a recent example. The language stewards added a class keyword to ES6 in large part to quash further Balkanization of JS OOP. Why didn’t JS wither while Lisp did? Ah! The answer is very relevant to your question. Every popular language began as the scripting language for an explosively successful platform. JavaScript being the only way to script browsers bought it over a decade of time to fix its warts while it really wasn’t a “good” general-purpose language strictly on its merits. Likewise, C and C++ were the scripting languages of Unix and Windows native application development. Ruby is the scripting language of Rails, for another example. What is Lisp the scripting language of? A CS wag would reply, “Lisp!” And that is simply not good enough to motivate enough people to standardize the things that would lead to widespread adoption. It’s a social problem, just as TFA says. Which leads us to a different essay about Lisp succeeding and failing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better |
Planners&scheduling in the military&logistics (airlines, airports, train operators, satellites, ...), expert systems for maintenance, computational engineering systems (for example for airplanes from Airbus and Boeing), theorem provers (used in chip design), symbolic mathematics, natural language systems (text translation for the EU), ...