I haven’t talked about Common-Lisp on Irreal for a long time. That’s mostly because the majority of my recent Lisp programming has been in Elisp but I still love Common-Lisp and Scheme and am always happy when I find an interesting article about them. I particularly like articles that show how Lisp is being used to solve real world problems.
For a long time, the canonical example of this has been ITA Software, but there are others and azzamsa and his collaborators have a list. When he saw the list, Alex Nygren told them about his company Kina Knowledge that makes extensive use of Common-Lisp and its homegrown lisp, DLisp, that compiles to Javascript. That led to a nice blog post by vindarel that describes the Kina system and how Lisp fits into it.
You should read the post for the details but the TL;DR is that their technology stack is made up of Ruby/Rails, Javascript, Common-Lisp, and DLisp. Most of their front end is written in DLisp and is available to the end user. The back end is Common-Lisp that does much of the heavy lifting. And, as a bonus, Nygren uses Emacs for his Lisp coding and documentation. It makes sense; if you’re a Lisper, Emacs is a natural fit.
The post is well worth a read if you’re interested in how Lisp is being used today. There aren’t, I’m sure, enough Lisp jobs for everyone who wants one but they aren’t non-existent either. Paul Graham famously described Lisp as their secret weapon at Viaweb and related how they tried to prevent their competitors from finding out they were using it. Perhaps more companies will get the message and the number of Lisp jobs will increase.