[i-LINK]

"Until now"? Do you really think that this is the first time a Lisp has been used to write an application? Is that because this is the first time you're hearing about it?

The first link is ancient, because CL has fallen into relative disuse, but that doesn't mean Common Lisp was without a purpose until quantum computing became a possibility: https://franz.com/success/ https://common-lisp.net/lisp-companies

You'll notice that most of these aren't user-facing applications or they're extremely specific to a particular industry. Common Lisp itself was standardized largely due to the demand of the US Department of Defense so they would have a single, combined dialect of Lisp for DoD/DARPA projects. That's the sort of language this has always been (entirely out-of-sight, and also for most of its life it was prohibitively expensive). It's similar to Ada, in that sense.

Python obviously does run on those same computers, yes, but most Common Lisp implementations have the benefit of compiling to machine code, while Python is interpreted.

[almostgotcaught]

Jeez lispers have the most enormous chip on their shoulders. You really don't see the irony in a comment that points to a compiler for a lang for a quantum computer as proof lisp is used to build important things?

> US Department of Defense so they would have a single, combined dialect of Lisp for DoD/DARPA projects.

I've worked on DoD projects (through NVESD) and this is like almost bald-faced lie. While I can believe DARPA has/had some connection to lisp (because of early expert systems) it's nearly impossible to believe the actual military has any lisp code anywhere. To with Ctrl+f here

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/5463/chapter/3

yields no hits but see this paragraph:

> Today, Ada is the most commonly used language for mission-critical defense software, which includes weapon systems and performance-critical command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) systems. DOD's inventory contains nearly 50 million lines of Ada code in these applications

[dang]

Would you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? You've done it more than once in this thread, and we're trying for the opposite here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[almostgotcaught]

Umm lol did you notice that someone upthread asked what lisp is good for

[dang]

That's not a good reason to post flamewar comments!

Btw if you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41206866, that was itself a flamewar comment of exactly the kind we don't want here.

[i-LINK]

Not sure if it's "impossible to believe," but I suppose everyone else is lying too.

I searched through dtic.mil w/ Google and there's a great amount of reports that detail DoD-funded research and projects that involved Common Lisp. This one is the most unambiguous:

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA303486.pdf "The Composite Warfare Model (CWM), a Navy simulation used successfully by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) and others, uses a fairly radical decomposition in which most attributes and methods are in their own class. Objects may have hundreds of super- classes. Written in Common Lisp, CWM is "linguistically advantaged" for this approach; ..."

An amount of those could've never been used (some are just proposals, and I'm not reading more or searching to see if they went anywhere) but some of them certainly were. It's mostly simulation and planning software, perhaps not mission-critical (I'd think garbage collection would be an obstacle there).

[Jtsummers]

> While I can believe DARPA has/had some connection to lisp (because of early expert systems) it's nearly impossible to believe the actual military has any lisp code anywhere.

It may be hard to believe, but just 7 or 8 years ago while working for DOD my colleagues the next aisle over were maintaining Lisp systems (the whole org was focused on maintaining systems, so I can offer little insight into new work, but probably not much in Lisp). So perhaps it's impossible to believe, but it's true.

Many of my colleagues there (who had been DOD employees for decades) got their start in the "AI Lab" there doing Lisp programming in the 80s.