* Google actively develops one of the Lisp compilers. Google Flights powers Orbitz, Kayak, etc. That's Lisp.
* There are several Lisp compilers in active open source development.
* There's a graph database written in Lisp called AllegroCache. It's good enough to support a business (Franz) for more than a decade.
* Another company (LispWorks) also exists and has a large portfolio of clients.
* Lisp has been used to make entire operating systems. Ones of the past, and ones of now. (Of course, an OS needs a community. But where are real OS's with GUIs in other languages?)
* Lisp has been successfully used in my own career for embedded systems to control satellite acquisition systems to, most recently, quantum computing. (At real companies.)
Just because there's not this huge buzz around Lisp doesn't mean no one is using it.
It wasn't even worth them spending 1 million dollars - 2% of that price - on training people.
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=s...
If that were the case, I would still expect to see lots of gushing blogs of leaks from inside hush-hush companies and people desperate to learn LISP posting "how do I replace strings in files in Common LISP" on programming forums, and "I learned LISP and doubled my salary" on Twitter.
Yet what you really see is Steve Yegge and "my EMACS code at Amazon was replaced with Java years ago" and "Facebook working on a new JavaScript thing" and "Microsoft working on a new JavaScript thing" and "Apple working on Swift" and "Fog Creek compile VBScript to PHP" and "rPi comes with Mathematica and Python" and so on and so on.
I wasn't saying that no one is using it. I was saying "if it was the best - as claimed - then there would be a buzz around Common LISP, because huge numbers of people would be using it".
Your points about your career are pretty interesting.
Generally the industry has problems reusing old/existing technology. See for example the Javascript domain, where new frameworks for web development pop up every week and the lifespan of frameworks is measured in months.
Instead of using/enhancing existing tools, there is a constant pressure to develop new stuff. Or take Apple with Swift. Instead of using Scala, Standard ML, OCAML, F# or Haskell, they developed a new statically-typed functional language.
It's the NIH syndrome at work. Everywhere. But it's also that tools are complex to learn, so people start new with simpler tools, they grow over time and after some time they are replaced with other stuff. If something gets updated in some incompatible ways, it already causes problems: some users are lost, some users will only use the old stuff, some only the latest stuff and some will try to use multiple versions. See Python.
Full Common Lisp is just too complex for most developers, but it has a life in many specialised and niche applications: CAD, some AI tools, music, robots (like the Roomba), planning/scheduling (crews, telescopes, ...), Expert Systems, verification of software and hardware, some maths stuff, ...
Since Lisp is only left being taught at a few universities, there are not many people able to develop with it. Even when it was taught, it was often only used to teach concepts like recursion and not programming. The younger Lisp programmers found it by themselves.
'Industry' sometimes often has no interest to diversify their programming tools. Many enterprise software shops currently (still) use Java: standardised, broad industry support, ... You won't successfully propose to them to use Lisp, even if the application would be better in some way. For example if the project fails, it certainly wasn't Java fault, because all the others are using it too. If you would use Lisp and the project would fail, it would be Lisp's problem: not enough people, little architecture experience, tools not broad enough, integration story too weak etc... Even it would be successful and in production, there would be a lot of pressure to rewrite it in some industry standard in the next product iteration.
> "if it was the best - as claimed - then there would be a buzz around Common LISP, because huge numbers of people would be using it"
There is no general 'best'. It's all relative to a domain, community, demands, legacy, fashion/hype, ...
Lisp is not more dead than usual. Yesterday there was a donation effort started for the Quicklisp library manager and it's now at $16606.37 .
One issue that (good) bosses have is that they cannot allow their business to be held hostage by one person. If that person quits (or dies), they have to be able to replace them. Esolangs are a hard sell on that basis alone, no matter how fit for use they may be.
I'd forgotten Clojure (and others!) - yes, Lisp is more popular than "things named Lisp". And, arguably, Clojure is popular enough these days that the argument in the previous paragraph doesn't really apply to it any longer. (Whether bosses know that is a separate issue.)
Then there's the claim by Guy Steele that, in creating Java, he dragged a bunch of C++ programmers "halfway to Common Lisp". (Lisp purists might concede some fraction considerably less than half...) Paul Graham says that the Lisp feature set is slowly taking over programming languages. Lisp may die but still conquer, or mostly conquer.
There's this thing called Windows you may have heard of...
And, out of curiosity, what OS are you referring to?
> Just because there's not this huge buzz around Lisp doesn't mean no one is using it.
jodrellblank's claim was not that absolutely nobody is using it. The claim was, compared to how wonderful Lisp advocates claim the language is, relatively nobody is using it. If you compare the amount of software written in Lisp to the total amount of software written, and compare that to how wonderful Lisp is claimed to be, jodrellblank has a real point. And citing a handful (or several handfuls) of counter-examples does not refute the point at all.
