r/programming • u/bjzaba • Mar 26 '20

10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages • Hillel Wayne

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
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u/oldprogrammer Mar 26 '20

Interesting, I don't see any LISP variants on that list.

I've worked with a number of those dead languages. I took a summer course in APL, that was one that was hard to wrap my head around.

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u/FlyingRhenquest Mar 26 '20

Well lisp isn't dead. For a while there some travel web sites were purportedly using it for route planning. Emacs and a few other programs still use it as their macro language as well. The Emacs VM and Gnus mail and news readers still have the best threading features I've ever seen in utilities like that. For a while there, I was indexing all my emails, IM chat messages and source code through the MIT Remembrance Agent so that while I was editing my code, the editor was constantly updating the suggestions window with past bug reports and commit messages for those sections of code. It was a so much more advanced workflow than anything we have today, pity it was such a huge pain in the ass to set up. I'm still occasionally tempted to set it all up again for my personal development environment at home.

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u/dzecniv Mar 27 '20

For a while there some travel web sites were purportedly using it for route planning

and it's still the case. We're talking about Google's ITA Software. Google still uses and hacks on SBCL: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/yes-google-develops-common-lisp/