▲ 27 points

Ask HN: Are there any current startups using Lisp?

by stevekrouse·12y ago·13 comments·view on hn ↗

According to PG, LISP is the silver bullet programming language that unfortunately nobody uses. I was just wondering if there are any companies out there following his advice and using LISP to build a startup today.

13 comments

While Franz Inc. wouldn't be considered a start-up we are very active in the "New" Graph Database, NoSQL movement. Our product AllegroGraph is written in our Lisp and we have a large number of users, some using the DB in conjunction with Lisp.

http://www.franz.com/agraph/cresources/white_papers/ http://www.franz.com/agraph/success/

We also have several new use cases for Lisp and we have been trying to update these as we are permitted.

http://www.franz.com/success/

I would also point out the Dr. Kalet has recently release a second edition of his Bio Informatics book the end of October.

http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/bioinformatics/bo...

Do you consider Clojure a Lisp (it certainly is), then there's for example prismatic: http://getprismatic.com/

Yeah – Clojure's counts for sure. Thanks!

Circle (https://circleci.com/) is also using Clojure. I usually ctrl-f through "Who's Hiring?" posts for Clojure out of curiosity and there are generally 3-6 companies each month. Most seem to be using Clojure in conjunction with other JVM languages like Scala or Java itself (Circle is an exception).

StreamScience (http://streamscience.co) is pure Clojure

There are many companies that use various lisp dialects. Not many would be described as startups, but a bunch of them exist. A quick scan of http://lispjobs.wordpress.com will give you a few names:

* http://grammarly.com a NLP startup from the Ukraine, they provide a grammar checking tool.

* http://dwavesys.com a Canadian quantum computing company.

* http://agri-esprit.com is a French agriculture startup offering software for farms

* http://onshored.com equipment scheduling and resource management software. From Chicago

* http://zenrobotics.com a Finish company making, you guessed it: robots.

* http://www.novasparks.com/ FPGA

* http://siscog.pt/ Portuguese company, offers solutions for transportation companies

* And just today on reddit I read about http://bikefriday.com whose powered by CL(read more: http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1q1a1w/check_out_my_cl... )

As you can see, not a lot of traditional "cat pictures as a service" companies, but javascript is good enough for those, they don't really need lisp, unlike a quantum CPU manufacturer :)

From Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski:

A fair number of large companies do use Lisp for some serious work. A long list of Industrial Lisp projects can be found at http://pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/

ClimateCorp (who were recently acquired for ~£1bn) use a lot of Clojure, they've also open-sourced some of their Clojure projects: https://github.com/TheClimateCorporation

https://nightweb.net/

https://unfold.com/

I know of a few other startups that use Clojure in various degrees, but the above two are probably the only ones I know of that are nearly pure Clojure.

http://www.coect.net uses own Lisp dialect MetaJS http://metajs.coect.net

LISP is a dream language for the writer of unmaintainable code. Consider these baffling fragments:

    (lambda (*<8-]= *<8-[= ) (or *<8-]= *<8-[= ))

    (defun :-] (<) (= < 2))

    (defun !(!)(if(and(funcall(lambda(!)(if(and '(< 0)(< ! 2))1 nil))(1+ !))
    (not(null '(lambda(!)(if(< 1 !)t nil)))))1(* !(!(1- !)))))

https://www.thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html

Except the funny thing is they're not that baffling.

The first two can literally be read and understood in about a second by anyone who knows lisp. "Oh noes, they're not using the latin-alphabet for everything! Whatever shall we do!"

The third one is an example of taking away all indenting and spacing from a presumably badly written function, which makes any language unreadable, but at least in lisp consistent indenting and spacing is relatively easy to accomplish.

I suppose the obfuscated C contest entries or PERL golf would actually be far harder...

With all due respect, get lost. Flaged!