[Jach]

I think you need a bigger reference frame of Lisp's usage over its 50 year history that extends even to 2015. But even then, quoting Kent Pitman: "Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list." (My additions are video games and Mars rovers.)

[regularfry]

Part of the visibility issue is that there are very few big-name open source Common Lisp success stories which aren't CL implementations, or CL ecosystem tools. Most of the things in that list are big-ticket enterprisey applications.

[lispm]

There are a lot of CL open source tools and applications. But they tend to be specialized to domains which are exotic to many people.

Math: Maxima and Axiom

Blackboards: GBB

Robots: ROS

Music: OpenMusic

Bioinformatics: Biobike

Theorem Provers: ACL2, PVS

AI / Logic: Racer, KM

etc etc...

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

There's a lisp client for ROS, but also c++ and python clients (and others), it's not immediately clear what language the "core" is written in.

[regularfry]

Exactly. Where's CL's Rails, or Eclipse, or Postgres?

[lispm]

Lisp's Eclipse is called GNU Emacs and it's free software. It comes with more than a million lines of Lisp code supporting all kinds of development tasks.

[regularfry]

It's also not Common Lisp. I get that emacs lisp is a pretty good example of a lisp, but I do find it interesting that the Lisp designed to be the widely-applicable industry standard hasn't seen something on the same level.

[lispm]

Emacs Lisp is closely related to Common Lisp. Both are coming from Maclisp. Emacs Lisp also contains lots of Common Lisp functionality.

Emacs Lisp also has extensive communication facilities with Common Lisp. See SLIME/Swank.

> but I do find it interesting that the Lisp designed to be the widely-applicable industry standard hasn't seen something on the same level.

There are also Clozure CL IDE, the LispWorks IDE or the Allegro CL IDE. All three are written in Common Lisp.