[brlewis]

In companies, most languages have some kind of system to enforce style guidelines and restrict which dependencies can be used. Companies already restrict the flexibility of the languages they are already using. So flexibility is not the reason Lisp is unpopular among companies.

[jjav]

> some kind of system to enforce style guidelines

Are you talking about autoformatters like gofmt and its ilk? That won't enforce a consistent approach in Lisp which allows the programmer to infinitely outsmart any tool.

Or if you're talking about written-down guidelines, that can help, for a while. But those morph over time too, and so does the new code but the old code lives on forever. Every time a new CTO/Chief Architect shows up, things change but the existing code doesn't. Since we're on the topic of large companies with decades-old codebases, things have changed many many times and you'll have a very inconsistent mess in your hands. It happens even in fairly rigid languages like Java, I can't imagine what you'd end up with Lisp.

Has there ever even been any Lisp-based company with a 20+ year old codebase where a cast of tens of thousands of developers have worked on it over the years? I can't think of any but maybe I haven't heard of it.

Lisp is awesome for a team of 1 (for about a decade I used to write all my personal use code in Lisp) or maybe a small tighly-knit group. Beyond that, I can't see it working well over the long haul.

[brlewis]

I definitely include linters, not just style formatters.

> It happens even in fairly rigid languages like Java, I can't imagine what you'd end up with Lisp.

I imagine it would be about the same, with human factors dominating. If Lisp's flexibility pushed in the direction of inconsistency, the ease with which you could write codemods for Lisp would push in the direction of consistency.

> Has there ever even been any Lisp-based company with a 20+ year old codebase where a cast of tens of thousands of developers have worked on it over the years? I can't think of any but maybe I haven't heard of it.

I haven't heard of any either. If you hear about one, LMK if they're hiring.

[tonyarkles]

While ITA no longer exists as a separate entity I don’t think, my understanding is that they pretty much wrote everything in Lisp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software

https://franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/itastory...

Grammarly too, although I don’t think it qualifies as a 20-year codebase: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p...

[farray]

ITA started doing everything in Lisp, but especially as the original coding founder left, started hiring people doing stuff in Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, shell, C++, PL/SQL, etc.

The core software was still Common Lisp, but lots of cruft got added, and Conway's Law kicked in mightily.

[mm007emko]

And what's the point of having Lisp if you can't use it? Unpopular opinion alert: Bigger companies want programmers to be replacible resources which means they need to have huge talent pools. If you choose your tech stack for the fact that you can retain your people for only 12 to 18 months, you can't effectively use any of the advantages Lips languages offer to you.