
Ask HN: Are there any current startups using Lisp? - stevekrouse
According to PG, LISP is the silver bullet programming language that unfortunately nobody uses. I was just wondering if there are any companies out there following his advice and using LISP to build a startup today.
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cnorvell
While Franz Inc. wouldn't be considered a start-up we are very active in the
"New" Graph Database, NoSQL movement. Our product AllegroGraph is written in
our Lisp and we have a large number of users, some using the DB in conjunction
with Lisp.

[http://www.franz.com/agraph/cresources/white_papers/](http://www.franz.com/agraph/cresources/white_papers/)
[http://www.franz.com/agraph/success/](http://www.franz.com/agraph/success/)

We also have several new use cases for Lisp and we have been trying to update
these as we are permitted.

[http://www.franz.com/success/](http://www.franz.com/success/)

I would also point out the Dr. Kalet has recently release a second edition of
his Bio Informatics book the end of October.

[http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/bioinformatics/bo...](http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/bioinformatics/book_Ira-
Kalet.lhtml)

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terhechte
Do you consider Clojure a Lisp (it certainly is), then there's for example
prismatic: [http://getprismatic.com/](http://getprismatic.com/)

~~~
stevekrouse
Yeah – Clojure's counts for sure. Thanks!

~~~
enoch_r
Circle ([https://circleci.com/](https://circleci.com/)) is also using Clojure.
I usually ctrl-f through "Who's Hiring?" posts for Clojure out of curiosity
and there are generally 3-6 companies each month. Most seem to be using
Clojure in conjunction with other JVM languages like Scala or Java itself
(Circle is an exception).

~~~
AdamWynne
StreamScience ([http://streamscience.co](http://streamscience.co)) is pure
Clojure

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pavelludiq
There are many companies that use various lisp dialects. Not many would be
described as startups, but a bunch of them exist. A quick scan of
[http://lispjobs.wordpress.com](http://lispjobs.wordpress.com) will give you a
few names:

* [http://grammarly.com](http://grammarly.com) a NLP startup from the Ukraine, they provide a grammar checking tool.

* [http://dwavesys.com](http://dwavesys.com) a Canadian quantum computing company.

* [http://agri-esprit.com](http://agri-esprit.com) is a French agriculture startup offering software for farms

* [http://onshored.com](http://onshored.com) equipment scheduling and resource management software. From Chicago

* [http://zenrobotics.com](http://zenrobotics.com) a Finish company making, you guessed it: robots.

* [http://www.novasparks.com/](http://www.novasparks.com/) FPGA

* [http://siscog.pt/](http://siscog.pt/) Portuguese company, offers solutions for transportation companies

* And just today on reddit I read about [http://bikefriday.com](http://bikefriday.com) whose powered by CL(read more: [http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1q1a1w/check_out_my_cl...](http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1q1a1w/check_out_my_cl_project_custom_bike_configurator/) )

As you can see, not a lot of traditional "cat pictures as a service"
companies, but javascript is good enough for those, they don't really need
lisp, unlike a quantum CPU manufacturer :)

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nimeshneema
From Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski:

A fair number of large companies do use Lisp for some serious work. A long
list of Industrial Lisp projects can be found at
[http://pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-
companies/](http://pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/)

------
ig1
ClimateCorp (who were recently acquired for ~£1bn) use a lot of Clojure,
they've also open-sourced some of their Clojure projects:
[https://github.com/TheClimateCorporation](https://github.com/TheClimateCorporation)

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dizzystar
[https://nightweb.net/](https://nightweb.net/)

[https://unfold.com/](https://unfold.com/)

I know of a few other startups that use Clojure in various degrees, but the
above two are probably the only ones I know of that are nearly pure Clojure.

------
dogada
[http://www.coect.net](http://www.coect.net) uses own Lisp dialect MetaJS
[http://metajs.coect.net](http://metajs.coect.net)

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eip
LISP is a dream language for the writer of unmaintainable code. Consider these
baffling fragments:

    
    
        (lambda (*<8-]= *<8-[= ) (or *<8-]= *<8-[= ))
    
        (defun :-] (<) (= < 2))
    
        (defun !(!)(if(and(funcall(lambda(!)(if(and '(< 0)(< ! 2))1 nil))(1+ !))
        (not(null '(lambda(!)(if(< 1 !)t nil)))))1(* !(!(1- !))))) 
    
    

[https://www.thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html](https://www.thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html)

~~~
ACow_Adonis
Except the funny thing is they're not that baffling.

The first two can literally be read and understood in about a second by anyone
who knows lisp. "Oh noes, they're not using the latin-alphabet for everything!
Whatever shall we do!"

The third one is an example of taking away all indenting and spacing from a
presumably badly written function, which makes any language unreadable, but at
least in lisp consistent indenting and spacing is relatively easy to
accomplish.

I suppose the obfuscated C contest entries or PERL golf would actually be far
harder...

