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by mbrodersen
1545 days ago
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A number of Lisp fans seems to care. That’s why we regularly see articles on HN trying to convince other developers to use Lisp. It has been going on for years. Article after article written by frustrated Lisp fans, not understanding why the language they love is not mainstream. Often making bizarre claims about non-Lisp developers not being smart enough to “get” Lisp or whatever. Not having a clue that most developers care about a lot more than just the programming language. The best way to show the “power” of Lisp is to develop commercially successful software using it. That will do way more to convince smart developers to try out Lisp than writing yet another Lisp article trying to “sell” Lisp. |
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My claim is that Lisp is perfect for thinking about a new idea or a new approach.
For example, I implemented a program that merged Expert Systems and Knowledge Representation into a single system (KROPS) that allowed a domain expert to express their knowledge as rules or as facts. Anything the system learned by either method could be expressed in either representation. Thus, the two representations were "unified".
Another effort involved Human-Robot Cooperation to change a car tire (TIRES). The system could interact with the human through pseudo-natural language, learn rules dynamically, and expand its knowledge base of the current situation in real time. So the system self-modifies and learns through human interaction on the task.
Both of these systems required self-modifying code which is rather more difficult to do in other languages. In Lisp this is trivial.
As for commercial sales witness:
Axiom, a 1.2 million line Computer Algebra program written in Common Lisp, was sold commercially by the Numerical Algorithms Group.
YESOPS, an IBM Expert System program implemented in Common Lisp, was sold commercially.