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Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)

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372 points Eric_WVGG | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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dahart ◴[] No.41860159[source]
> Why is most AI work done in Lisp?

That’s changed, of course, but it remained true for at least another 15 or 20 years after this article was written and then changed rather quickly, perhaps cemented with deep neural networks and GPUs.

Other than running the emacs ecosystem, what else is Lisp being used for commonly these days?

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iLemming ◴[] No.41860409[source]
Some purist won't consider Clojure a "true" Lisp, but it's a Lisp dialect.

> what else is Lisp being used for commonly these days?

Anything that runs on Clojure - Cisco has their cybersec platform and tooling running on it; Walmart their receipt system; Apple - their payments (or something, not sure); Nubank's entire business runs on it; CircleCI; Embraer - I know uses Clojure for pipelines, not sure about CL, in general Common Lisp I think still quite used for aircraft design and CAD modeling; Grammarly - use both Common Lisp and Clojure; Many startups use Clojure and Clojurescript.

Fennel - Clojure-like language that compiles to Lua can handle anything Lua-based - people build games, use it to configure their Hammerspoon, AwesomeWM, MPV, Wez terminal and things-alike, even Neovim - it's almost weird how we're circling back - decades of arguing Emacs vs. Vim, and now getting Vim to embrace Lisp.

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1. tombert ◴[] No.41861671[source]
When I was there, Apple used Clojure for a lot of stuff involving the indexing of iTunes/Apple Music. I used it for some telemetry stuff on top of the indexer as well. Not sure what other teams used it for.