We have a few services built in Clojure and we expose nrepl port on our pods in our SDEs, it's enormously helpful to test and debug things on the fly, without having to re-deploy anything.
Somewhere, I have a copy of a commercial LISP for Windows which would compile to an executable --- apparently this sort of thing is still possible, but it's not widely known/used, and sadly Jean-Marie Hullot's "SOS Interface" for the Mac was co-opted to NeXTstep:
https://denninginstitute.com/itcore/userinterface/GUIHistory...
I'd dearly love to see a RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool using LISP w/ a nifty UI for working up a GUI which would compile to something easily deployed (maybe HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript) as a stand-alone/single-file web application?
Personally I think/hope they would have earlier discoveries / more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc.
Maybe the world would be guix/Hurd!
Yeah, that, uh, doesn't sound like Lisp
AWS already has lots of AMI and docker are essentially image based.
We would version whole images in something like git, and that's all.
I'm strongly convinced, having used Scheme, CL, Racket, Clojure that Lisp is doomed to be (mostly) a hobby language.
The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet another DSL invented by the next developer next to them.
Racket's theme of being a "programming language for building programming languages" is just the poster child of this naivety: I don't want even more friction.
What scales and works is simple and boring.
That's by the way why also Haskell has struggled forever. Beyond its dreadful DX, poor tooling and unacceptable compilation times, the language is just plagued by compiler extensions and every single developer reinventing its own abstractions.
There was the simple haskell movement to just standardize around a set of extensions and conventions, but nope, these languages unavoidably attract people that want to stay in the ivory tower.
Really, I love both lisps and haskell, but I would take a dreadful php over them every single day at work. No contest.
On the contrary, we considered it a major reason we were able to build a quite successful stock broker and bank from scratch with a team of 4-6 people, who doubled as datacenter ops (we ran on-prem), internal tech support for the rest of the firm (~20 people) and 2.line customer support.
We quite naturally converged on a set of internal libraries for various tasks. Understanding and fixing each other’s code was not a big deal.
Coincidentally, our frontend was php. That was messier, and we conciously kept that layer as lean as possible.
Not that these people are necessarily bad at their jobs, but they're definitely a personality type you should learn to identify so you can manage them properly.
> I think most people who have led teams will know exactly what I'm talking about.
I've had those as leads themselves, with great benefit and pain. They further convinced me about the beauty of ugly and boring.
The fact that Lisp is the “programmable programming language” doesn't mean that every engineer should be inventing weird versions of while loops. What it does mean is that a skilled Lisp programmer can build a domain-specific language that substantially helps in development.
One good example of this is the Crash Bandicoot games, along with the same studio's Jax and Daxter, which were built with dialects of Lisp (yes, they had to compile the code, and take care with storage allocation, just like any other game code). Cisco hired Kent Dybvig, principal author of the Chez Scheme system, and open-sourced that software; I have no clue what they use it for, to be honest, but I assume that they had some reason for doing this. Companies using various Lisp languages have been documented in areas from fintech to quantum computing.
Says who, you? Wrong. I use Common Lisp at work.
edit: and not just use as in a side toy, design and writing software in CL is my primary responsibility. FWIW, at a FAANG!
Do you work on ITA? Only FAANG I'm aware of using Lisp is Google.
Have you like looked at anything in the Clojure ecosystem because this description makes no sense of any kind. Clojure has macros but less powerful than common lisp and Clojure code in the ecosystem tends to be small and understandable.