Running Lisp in Production (2020)

We've also been using Lisp in production. It has gone wonderfully, and has allowed some of the most simultaneously maintainable, resilient, and efficient code I've seen in my career. It's also attractive differentiator to some programmers who don't want to drone away writing bulk-Java day-in and day-out. A key to running Lisp in production is to step away from thinking of it as a lone-wolf bionic-suit hacker language, and to invest in developing a style guide, code review guidelines, CI/CD…

Previous discussions from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16679963 (Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure, so it's nice to see large-scale Lisp success stories. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, as it's one of my two favourite languages (the other one being, of course, C). Edit: APL is a close third, but let's be realistic.

Back in Amazon I found some ancient code written in Common Lisp. Doubt any production services left, but I updated the build system to support Clozure CL. My contribution in $BIGCORP :)

I like lisp as a programming language. But, this article gives one of the reasons for avoiding its use in a high performance production environment. Provisioning a VM with over 25GB RAM for an application which requires about 4GB of it is a huge waste of resources. While the common wisdom on HN is that for most applications, developer costs more than physical resources. Physical resources still cost money. Initially list might be a good option for development velocity. But…