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by mxben 1425 days ago
Can you (or anyone who has run Lisp software in production) share how the experience has been? Do the management and other colleagues like it? Do they express any concerns? Want to understand the social aspect of running Lisp in production.
2 comments

I’ve run lisp in production (SBCL). Fast to develop and run, and solid. Unfortunately the engineering team tasked with taking the product forward decided to rewrite it entirely in some version of react on (the quite unfortunately named, from my point of view) AWS lambdas because the frameworks these days are so choc full of stuff, most importantly security stuff!, that nothing can really compete with them anymore, even though the engineering overhead to use them is massive. (Edit: To be fair, the engineering overhead for me to write all that crap into Lisp would have been way more massive.) As a non-user-facing back-end, however, lisp is fantastic.
We're using CL in prod for an embedded system (https://evacsound.com/) for some years now, fairly smooth sailing. It started out as an MVP/prototype so implementation was of no concern, then gained enough velocity and market interest that a rewrite was infeasible. We re-train talent on the job instead.

Incidentally I also did an algo trading system in CL at some point (who didn't?). The sibling comment is spot on that outside of deep backend it's a self-reinforcing ecosystem with too much focus on auxiliary stuff if you have to re-implement it.