From: Al Cole
Subject: What is LISP used for today?
Date: 
Message-ID: <9ttvai$2iq$1@netnews.upenn.edu>
I had a course about 15 years ago where we were required to learn LISP. At
the end of the course I had to write a LISP interpreter program (FORTRAN)
which read in a LISP program and executed the statements.
At that time, or shortly after, I was also learning PASCAL and C. These
programming languages quickly became my perfered language to use.
Based on the activity of this new group, I can assume that LISP is still
being used.  What type of applications are being generated using LISP? Is
there a commercial usage for LISP? Have there been significant improvements
in the language and syntax?
From: Vebjorn Ljosa
Subject: Re: What is LISP used for today?
Date: 
Message-ID: <cy37ksdmjq7.fsf@ljosa.com>
* "Al Cole" <·····@uphs.upenn.edu>
| I had a course about 15 years ago where we were required to learn LISP. At
| the end of the course I had to write a LISP interpreter program (FORTRAN)
| which read in a LISP program and executed the statements.
| At that time, or shortly after, I was also learning PASCAL and C. These
| programming languages quickly became my perfered language to use.
| Based on the activity of this new group, I can assume that LISP is still
| being used.  What type of applications are being generated using LISP? Is
| there a commercial usage for LISP? 

See <URL:http://www.lisp.org/table/applications.htm> and
<URL:http://www.franz.com/success/index.lhtml>.

| Have there been significant improvements
| in the language and syntax?

I belong to the "new generation" of Lispers who have never used
pre-Common Lisps (except Emacs Lisp), so I'll leave this question for
someone else.

-- 
Vebjorn Ljosa
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: What is LISP used for today?
Date: 
Message-ID: <sfw7ksdjrvs.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>
"Al Cole" <·····@uphs.upenn.edu> writes:

> I had a course about 15 years ago where we were required to learn LISP. At
> the end of the course I had to write a LISP interpreter program (FORTRAN)
> which read in a LISP program and executed the statements.
> At that time, or shortly after, I was also learning PASCAL and C. These
> programming languages quickly became my perfered language to use.
> Based on the activity of this new group, I can assume that LISP is still
> being used.  What type of applications are being generated using LISP? Is
> there a commercial usage for LISP? Have there been significant improvements
> in the language and syntax?

See my recent two-part interview at http://slashdot.org/

Part I:  http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/03/1726251&mode=thread
Part II: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/13/0420226&mode=thread

It answers a lot of questions similar to these in considerable detail.
comp.lang.lisp / 2001 / nov