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by regularfry 4052 days ago
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.
1 comments
lispm 4052 days ago
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.

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regularfry 4050 days ago
> There are also Clozure CL IDE, the LispWorks IDE or the Allegro CL IDE. All three are written in Common Lisp.

So what's stopped these from getting to Emacs' level of popularity?

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lispm 4050 days ago
> So what's stopped these from getting to Emacs' level of popularity?

Emacs is not an editor. Emacs is a family of editors. You are probably talking about GNU Emacs.

They never tried and it would not make sense. GNU Emacs exists already and supports Lisp development very well. The other tools have concentrated on other things: GUI-based IDEs for Lisp.

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regularfry 4049 days ago
> Emacs is not an editor. Emacs is a family of editors. You are probably talking about GNU Emacs.

You tell me, you brought it up!

> They never tried and it would not make sense. GNU Emacs exists already and supports Lisp development very well. The other tools have concentrated on other things: GUI-based IDEs for Lisp.

Emacs is for more than Lisp development, though. It's not popular because you can do Lisp in it, it's popular because you can do everything in it. So we're back to my earlier question, which is why we haven't seen major, broad-based wins for Common Lisp, on the scale that we have for other languages.

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lispm 4049 days ago
> You tell me, you brought it up!

I talked about GNU Emacs.

> Emacs is for more than Lisp development, though.

Not Emacs, GNU Emacs. That's what I wrote.

> we haven't seen major, broad-based wins for Common Lisp, on the scale that we have for other languages.

Common Lisp tends to be used in very specialized areas. It's a complex language.

Though sometimes it has been used where you don't see it, but you may be affected. American Express runs a Lisp based system checking credit card transactions. Should be running for two decades or longer. Amazon was using Lisp to compute some stuff on their shopping pages. CIA and NSA use it to spy on us. Lots of aircrafts (Airbus & Boeing) and cars (Jaguar, Ford, ...) were designed with Lisp-based CAD systems. NASA uses it for checking software correctness. Chip makers like AMD have used it to check processor designs for correct operations. There are many of those applications. Google's flight search engine has its core written in Lisp. Dwave wrote the software for their quantum processor in Lisp. There is a broadband internet of satellite company running Lisp on their antennas. Parts of the precursor software of Apple's Siri were written in Lisp. That's the stuff what it was originally was designed for...

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