Which lisp to use

Apache Storm is a distributed tool for real-time processing of large data volumes. The project is based on Clojure and Java and was open-sourced under Apache License 2.

Interoperability with Java is the main feature of Clojure that allows integrating the Clojure code into any project already written in Java. Riemann is a tool for distributed system monitoring. It aggregates events from user servers and applications, combines them into a stream and transmits them for further processing or storage.

Greater flexibility and fault-tolerance make Riemann different from other similar systems. This is a Lisp dialect implemented in Racket. The site author, Paul Graham, also took part in the development of this language and, as you can see, has found a practical use for it. One of the goals was to create a community similar to that formed on Reddit in its early days surprisingly, at that time it was written in Common Lisp as well until it was migrated to Python in Read more Advantages of Functional Programming Here in Typeable, we use Haskell as the main development language and we would like to share our opinion which is based on this experience.

Today we are going to tell you why we write frontend in Haskell and compile it to JavaScript. We were able to gain the benefits of JS transpilation. Read more 7 Useful Tools Written in Haskell Haskell is a pure functional general-purpose programming language.

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People who use LISP don't tend to shout too loudly about it but there's a handful of examples of a few high-profile startups having used it to great effect over the last 20 years. It is also very popular with small companies in Europe. This is a valid question, but it's not an easy one to answer. It may also not be a particularly useful one to answer: many implementations have a specific focus so are best chosen if they fit your particular problem rather than based on how widely it is otherwise used.

Instead, I'll tell you a little bit about your options and you can decide for yourself. LISP is a family of languages and each of those languages has a family of dialects and implementations. That is to say, it was a HUGE language. It had everything. Over the last few years, Clojure has appeared. Traditionally, other LISPs have been strictly multi-paradigm. There's still a lot of the verbosity of Java-based languages and they've been fairly free and easy with the syntax so that has lots of knobs and buttons for different things, but they've got some really interesting ideas around datatypes, especially some of the practical ways they have come up with to apply ideas from functional programming.

Yes: they have a maths joke in there. Scheme is a standardised language in a way that other LISPs are not. This helps greatly with portability between implementations, but it's not a silver bullet. The standardisation efforts have tended to be conservative and innovations in the implementations, especially around things like modules, have tended to be disparate.

People use it to standardise small things as needed. Schemes are different from LISPs that they have a set of hard requirements that they must satisfy, one of which is "tail call optimisation" which helps make recursion efficient.

That is to say, it's a small languages and you're supposed to be able to keep all of it in your head at once. The R7RS standardisation process is currently ongoing and has tried to include both the R5RS implementers' desires as well as those of the R6RS folk by standardising a small base language in their first working group and then commissioning a second working group to standardise the larger features.

This will allow the language to have efficient and useful implementations on both tiny embedded hardware as well as more capable machines. It's tiny! It's author wrote it for himself and, as I understand it, he's been making a living off of it since the s.

If you ever get the opportunity to attend a talk by him then you should do it: he's really interesting and really knows his stuff and you won't get even the smallest sniff of anything mainstream or boring. Racket is an R6RS scheme but lately it seems to have widened the net and is trying "to serve as a platform for language creation, design, and implementation. Chicken aims to be a practical Scheme.

It's based on R5RS and compiles down to C. This turns out to be a really, really, important advantage as it makes it absolutely trivial to use existing C libraries. Therefore Chicken is probably the most useful scheme for replacing Perl, Python, Ruby, etc, as your day-to-day scripting language. There are several people who have used it exclusively for all their needs for several years.

It has an interactive REPL as well as a compiler. The community both on the mailing list and IRC are knowledgeable, friendly and helpful. Look for an implementation with lots of modules: this shows that it's widely usable and means that it's likely to have something that helps with the task at hand. A lot of the implementations designed for teaching are very difficult to use for general purpose scripting.

I'd recommend Chicken as that's what I use. I've used it in my personal projects and I've used it and am currently using it professionally. I don't want to invest undue effort in something if its totally obsolete - I'd still learn it if it was professionally "dead", but only with an academic perspective Scheme isn't professionally dead, but you might have to go to some lengths to use it in that context.

Something like Chicken is far more than an academic pursuit and it can easily cover almost all the bases of whatever high-level languages you currently use. Can't really speak for all Lisps but Clojure is definitely a hot and relevant language at present.

I've found it to be a very enlightening experience to learn Lisp in the form of Clojure over the past year after a lot of experience with Java and C. Main reasons for this are:. I personally know of people using Clojure in a couple of investment banks and startups. I've also chosen Clojure as the primary development language for my own startup, so I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is I'm currently learning Lisp as well and I love it.

As for uses, Lisp has been used a lot in Artificial Intelligence but I'll be honest, I'm not sure how many other "general" uses for Lisp. A lot of the websites that were built in Lisp originally have been re-written in other languages so it is hard to say that it is used in web development not saying it isn't, but the larger sites that use it no longer do. After doing a quick search very quick here is a list of software written in Common Lisp from Wikipedia.

They aren't as numerous as, say Java or C jobs, but they exist. I think Lisp is one of those languages that is used for internal applications and may provide a competitive advantage which companies don't want to give up by advertising that they use Lisp.

I remember seeing a post on P. SE that stated Smalltalk was similar in the financial arena. Also, being able to show you are able to learn different paradigms can open up more doors even if you don't use Lisp in the job.

If you want to learn Lisp today, I'd have a look at either racket, which is a fast scheme implementation well, it actually departed a little from scheme, so it is its own dialect now or clojure, which benefits from the JVM it runs on so gazillions of libraries are available, plus you can make it interact with your own Java code.

Even if you don't learn it to actually use it, learning it is always beneficial : you learn new ways to think and deal with problems, even in other languages, once you've wrapped your mind around Lisp for a while. Stores is one of classic examples of Lisp web apps. From the Yahoo! Stores fame you may have heard of Paul Graham. Graham is one of the best known Lisp advocates and writes extensively about this subject. You might want to read his site to known his points.

Scheme is a clean language and very elegant. It's probably my favorite programming language so I may be biased. If I was going to write right now a major application I'd probably write a skeleton application in C, extend and define business rules in Scheme. This allows me use Scheme and to leverage C - for speed and for the sheer availability of libraries for almost everything.

But one company to keep an eye on is Naughty Dog. All of their games are written with a Lisp dialect. Originally, they rolled their own, but they use MZScheme in the Uncharted series.

I'd wager that Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme, and Emacs Lisp are the four most widely used dialects, and of those, I'd suspect that Scheme is the most commonly-deployed. I don't have anything to back this up with, of course. I think it partially depends on what you want to do with it - if you are looking at furthering your insights into the various concepts of programming and make yourself a better programmer then I would say it is worth learning at least a modicum of Lisp.

If you're looking for yet another language to add to your resume with a view to getting a job working with this language, you probably want to look elsewhere. There aren't that many Lisp jobs out there. Now all I need to do is find the time to actually play with those languages Also in New York the clojure meetup group is huge.

It seems to be absolutely enormous in the New York area, other areas may vary. Also LISP is a different way of thinking. A classic example is how to implement MAX a, b, c. You could make a convoluted function with a bunch of if statements. Or you could just say.

Although if performance is an issue you might want to do it the other way too, I did not bother to count the number of comparisons when using each method Also if you are implementing MAX via a C macro or other method that evaluates the expressions multiple times you may not get the expected result as the expression may be evaluated multiple times so watch out with side effects First, Lisp is a great language for writing code in which interactions between functions or data are often complex.

In many popular languages, if you're confused about why your program is doing what it's doing, you have to write special functions to let you examine the program's internal state as it's going along.

In some languages, you then have to wait for your code to recompile. Of course there may be tools such as debuggers that help with this. In Lisp, though, all you need is a way to stop the program, and then, typically, you have access to everything in Lisp. Once I stop the program, I'm instantly thrown into a debugger--but the debugger gives me all of the power of Lisp, and I can exit the debugger, call specific functions, etc. I can easily examine any of the data structures in my program.

Some implementations such as SBCL support tail recursion, while others simply do not, since this is not a strict requirement of the standard. The function below uses the DO iteration macro. Now we have solutions expressed in recursive, iterative and functional style. We do have now functions to fetch keys in nested hash tables, but is there a way we can tell what are all the keys in a given hash table? In other words we want to know the key paths we can fetch in a hash table using above functions.

Another possible approach to above function is to completely get rid of the recursion as a whole and use a stack data structure along with iteration. Then we will see another implementation using a Depth-First Search approach. Another useful function from Clojure is select-keys.

Another useful bit from the functional world is the group-by function. Check out group-by in Racket and group-by in Clojure for more info. Using group-by we can group items in equivalence groups. Say for example we want to group all items in a list in groups determined by their length. Another example showing how to group items in a list based on whether the item is being an odd number. One final word about group-by - you should note that this functionality can already be used as part of the group-by library , which is available in Quicklisp, and contains more features out of the box such as using custom functions to extract the keys and values from items.

Often times I find myself needing to repeat some sequence of items a given number of times. Here is how we can implement them. When you need to partition a list of items into groups we can use the partition function as described below. Here is a recursive approach to implementing this function. And the iterative approach using DO iteration macro looks like this.

However, see what happens if we try partitioning with a number greater than the items we can put in the group. The last group contains only two items, since there was nothing left to fill in it.

We can improve our first version of the partition function to support padding as well. Using the :pad key we can now fill our groups with whatever items is required to make it up for the number of items we initially requested, e. Implementing DFS is one of the things I tend to implement when starting with a new language.

It is a good task to practice on. The solution below is more-or-less a translation of how I would implement this in Scheme for example. I will use a property list to represent the adjacency list of vertices in my sample graph. Perhaps a better way to represent this would be to use a class, but I have yet to learn about CLOS in my Common Lisp journey, so for now a plist would be more than enough.

This works fine for our sample graph, but what if we wanted to traverse other data structures? Turns out that with slight modifications to above code we can make our DFS function work just fine with anything that can be traversed. Using our latest version of DFS we can now pass functions, which would evaluate the list of neighbors for a given node. Using our sample graph from before we can now DFS walk it like this. Macros is one of the areas in which Lisp truly shines compared to other programming languages.