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by kaveh808 1298 days ago
The JPL Lisp story is a fun story, and cool application of Lisp over 20 years ago. But it is by no means a Lisp success story. There is a reason no space probe since then has been controlled using Lisp (as far as I know).

Your links didn't come through, so I don't know what web site you are referring to. Maybe Orbitz? That was one success and still continues to be developed in CL by Google AFAIK. One outlier data point perhaps.

As for the 6.001 course at MIT, I took that course back in the day, and was saddened to hear it now is taught in Python.

You are correct that we need languages which have a ready supply of developers. In a commercial setting that fact alone will trump any language features or technology advantage. Java was meant to be the new Cobol and works hard at limiting programmer flexibility so they don't shoot themselves in the foot.
1 comments
ovis 1298 days ago
"This website" referred to Hacker News itself, which is written in a Lisp (Arc).
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NtochkaNzvanova 1298 days ago
I don't think there's anything remarkable about this website that could be considered a "big win" for Lisp. It's a totally run-of-the-mill dynamic web app that could have been developed more quickly in any web framework such as Rails or Django.

In fact, the hacky way it was implemented in Lisp had some clear downsides. In the early days (I'm probably going to mess up the details but hopefully the gist will come through) there was a notorious failure mode due to the way entities such as stories and comments were stored in memory using closures. These closures obviously had to be cleaned out periodically, and so if you stayed on a page too long and then clicked a link on the page, it would be invalid. You'd have to go back and refresh the page and click the link again. I don't think it's out of bounds to say this website is basically a rehash of the hacks pg came up with in the mid 90s to implement web apps in Lisp for Viaweb. The fact that he got rich off those hacks may have been a selling point for Lisp 20 years ago when he wrote Beating the Averages, but the world has moved on.

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