Greetings...
I don't know who started this (I'm late to this particular discussion)
but I must also go on record that there is much in my department that
is quite dependent on Lisp. In fact, I'd prefer that more of my staff
have Lisp expertise, because of what I know to be true regarding the
productivity of Lisp environments and programmers, and what is
tractable using the environment that I wouldn't seriously consider
using C or other languages.
In specific, there are two subsystems to my current project which are
implemented in Lisp. One is a document analysis tool, the other a
smart database-cognizant "stuffer" tool. Other components to the total
system are implemented in C and Objective-C, but I don't think we
would have been quite so successful trying these two in anything other
than Lisp.
What's important to us are the tools in the environment, the
incremental nature of Lisp development, and therefore the actual
productivity of my Lisp developers. In addition, there are constructs
and concepts in Lisp that aren't quite so strongly embodied in most
other languages, so that I find Lisp-cognizant staff are quite a bit
more literate in language issues than most that don't have a Lisp
background.
-- Sam Hahn (ยทยทยท@esl.com)