[lispm]

Already in the 80s the Lisp Machine OS had > 1 MLOC code lines with support for programming in the large. The development environment was networked from the start. A server keeps the definition of things on the network: machines, users, file systems, networks, gateways, printers, databases, mailers, ... The source code and documentation is usually shared in the team and versioned via a common file server.

Nowadays, there are large applications written by groups/teams, which are worked on for three or more decades. For example the ACL2 theorem prover has its roots in the 70s and is used/maintained until today for users in the chip industry.

Common Lisp was especially designed for the development and production use of complex programs. The military at that time wanted to have a single Lisp dialect for those - often applications came with their own Lisp, which made deployment difficult. A standard language for projects was then required.

These were usually developed by teams in the range of 5 - 100 people. Larger teams are rare.

[zozbot234]

"Designed for complex programs in the 1980s" is not really up to current standards. Moore's law means that complexity of overall systems can grow by multiple orders of magnitude in the 01980 -to- 02022 timeframe.

[lispm]

That was not the point. Lisp applications were already a team sport back then. That all or even most Lisp software is written by single person teams is just wrong.

[zozbot234]

Modern agile development is far more complex than even that: you need entire loosely-coupled teams of developers to be able to seamlessly cooperate with one another, so there are multiple scales of cooperation. Tightening the semantics of interface boundaries is a necessary support for that kind of development and is what's largely meant today by programming "in the large". Highly dynamic "scripting" languages get in the way of this, and that's essentially what Lisp is too.

[lispm]

Lisp isn't essentially a scripting language. Common Lisp was designed as an application language, in rare case it's also a systems language. On a Lisp Machine, for example the whole networking stack was written in it.

[mvc]

Never heard of Javascript?