The orange techbro forum site (news.ycombinator.com) is built on a Common Lisp backend (it used to be a Racket-based DSL before). IIRC Grammarly is (was?) also written in Common Lisp.
Years ago (early 2000s) in a product that suffered from poor product management, I worked on a codebase that included some Scheme, and a built-in Scheme interpreter to run it. I always liked the language.I think it might still have a niche in embedded systems and game dev, among other places (I read somewhere that it’s used in satellite software due to being hot reloadable)?
Don’t think the original LISP is used much anymore, but there’s various dialects like Scheme, Racket and Clojure.
Some examples where it’s used, off the top of my head:
- Lilypond for when you need your sheet music to be turing-complete. Uses Scheme.
- Emacs, for configuring the whole editor. (Has an own dialect, Elisp.)
- GNU Guix, which uses Scheme for configuring the entire operating system.
Obviously, you can also use them for general software development. A few years ago, I read of some project that used Clojure for a larger backend service, with the author gushing all over the place.
Some folks are really passionate about the LISPs, but yeah, not terribly popular in the corporate world…Guix is such a cool idea, but Nix accomplishes essentially the same thing, and the syntax is much more accessible in a post-JavaScript world. Most programmers nowadays aren’t that familiar with Lisp-like syntax, for better or worse.
I do agree, yeah, although I can certainly also understand LISP fans being annoyed that someone created a custom DSL for something that is adequately solved by the LISPs. I’m also certainly not enamored with the Nix syntax myself, but do find it easier to parse than a million parentheses.
But yeah, ultimately the complexity of Nix and Guix isn’t in the particular symbols you type out. The complexity comes from them being expression-based (which does make sense for the use-case, but isn’t as familiar as e.g. imperative languages), as well as just having to learn tons of modules for the different things you want to configure…
According to Greenspun’s tenth rule it’s everywhere ; )
Doesn’t GIMP use Scheme for its plugins?
A quick google of GIMP docs tells me it uses C, Python and Script-fu so, sorta?
Thanks. :) So not technically Scheme, but a fork of Scheme.
Script-Fu is probably the oldest binding system for extending GIMP. It is also a Scheme variant, which evolved independently for many years now.
Basically big, over ambitious projects that have a single developer
