
Ask HN: Why is there so many lisp variants? - officialvke
and which of those are likely to be used professionally (if lisp could be used for such)?<p>I don&#x27;t have any experience with lisp or with any of its variants but I&#x27;ve seen a lot of codes written in it.
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CyberFonic
You could ask why there are so many text editors out there? Basically, people
have found things that they wanted to be different so they came up with custom
versions to scratch their itch.

Whilst there are lots of variants, the three main ones to consider are:

Scheme, standard is R7RS - more academic and research oriented. SICP book is a
fantastic resource.

CommonLisp, standard is ANSI X3.226 - mostly used in commercial applications

Clojure, useful for interoperability with Java Virtual Machine.

Lisp is the "secret weapon" of many businesses, e.g. Paul Graham wrote ViaWeb
in CommonLisp. Brendan Eich was really planned to implement a Scheme variant,
but had to wrap it into a C-like syntax and call it JavaScript for marketing
reasons. Emacs (the editor) uses eLisp.

If you are thinking of using Lisp professionally, then CommonLisp is probably
your best bet. Once you know one Lisp, you can easily transfer the bulk of
your knowledge to other variants.

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dang
Because they're easy to make and easy to experiment with, and it's
fascinating.

Lisp is used professionally in lots of places, just not the most mainstream
ones. Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme, and others. And Hacker News is written in
Arc, so we use Lisp professionally here.

