Running Lisp in Production (2015)

https://tech.grammarly.com/blog/running-lisp-in-production

by wglb • 7 years ago

167 59 7 years ago

tech.grammarly.com

AlexMoffat• 7 years ago

“but we value choice and freedom over rules and processes.” Who could argue with that? It can sound pretty defensive though, like we know we have a bunch of nearly random stuff that few people can really understand and manage but, hey, freedom. Lisp has always been interesting and there’s always one or two companies in any time interval that are successful, and wildly so, using it. It could also be as much skill, great execution and a market.

Jach4• 7 years ago

It's easy to argue against, and many companies' higher ups successfully do and thus can mandate a monolanguage policy. For Grammarly, I still see them posting occasionally in the monthly who's-hiring threads for Lisp roles, I think they're doing fine.

I wonder if they've since run into more implementation specific issues and have shelled out for one of the proprietary Lisps. SBCL is always improving, though.

TurboHaskal4• 7 years ago

My experience is that mono-language policies (or similar tight, top-down controlling of the language stack) are simply a matter of time. All companies enforce that as they mature.

I have been working for two companies that adopted Clojure and Scala early on. They all have, within a period of two to three years, enforced a Java only monoculture with no new projects being written in the aforementioned languages.

The reasons were key engineers leaving for greener pastures and experiencing difficulties with staffing: Not being able to find (cheap) experienced developers, or failing to do in house training due to the lack of interest.

This might be hard to believe, considering that the average HN user would jump of excitement at the chance to learn something new, but then again, those languages were introduced with the JVM as the main selling point, meaning working mostly with Java developers, who are notorious for their resistance to learn _anything_.

dwheeler• 7 years ago

I don't know what they are doing currently, but the article from a few years ago said, "We run them on stock Linux images deployed to AWS. We use SBCL for production deployment and CCL on most of the developers’ machines."

Once a large application works in some environment, you usually need a good reason (such as lower overall cost or inability to keep it working) to switch. They hit a few unlikely bugs and have already developed solutions for them. If they switched, the odds are excellent that they'd hit new unlikely bugs that they haven't found solutions for, and it's hard to have a smaller cost than SBCL or Linux. So while they may have changed, there's a reasonable chance they haven't.

Throw_Away_48252• 7 years ago

There are more companies being more successful using PHP.

hhas013• 7 years ago

And no doubt many more companies being more unsuccessful using PHP too.

If you really must go comparing apples to pears, a marginally less worthless metric might be the percentage of each that has worms in.

fsloth• 7 years ago

Is grammarly still using Lisp? How's it going?

ngcc_hk• 7 years ago

Want to know as well.

gilesgate4• 7 years ago

Previous discussions from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16679963

(Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure, so it's nice to see large-scale Lisp success stories. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, as it's one of my two favourite languages (the other one being, of course, C).

Edit: APL is a close third, but let's be realistic.

msla• 7 years ago

APL is the ITS of the programming world: Both are immensely powerful and quirky, and were designed by people with a real allergy to typing. It would be nice if there were an Open Source APL which was the equivalent of SBCL in terms of being the default and feature-complete implementation; it would also be nice if APL were elegant as opposed to merely terse.

Throw_Away_48252• 7 years ago

(Common) Lisp usually gets more use than exposure

What? It gets exposure on the Internet all the time, while seemingly nearly no one uses it in production.

Edit: Just look at the end of [1]. They have exactly three examples.

Edit 2: They have more example in [2], but it is still pretty little.

[1] https://lisp-lang.org/

[2] https://lisp-lang.org/success/

Smithalicious• 7 years ago

This is getting downvoted and I don't see why. CL is easily in the top 10 programming languages I see mentioned on HN and it also comes up regularly outside of HN, yet the amount of people actually using it in production seems miniscule.

dang• 7 years ago

Also 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9785944

jammygit• 7 years ago

I did not realize common lisp was still in use and was therefore planning on learning Clojure instead. Which is better to learn then?

eschaton• 7 years ago

What made you think it was “no longer in use?” It’s a very big world. Just because something isn’t mentioned regularly in headlines doesn’t mean it’s not out there.

billsix• 7 years ago

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

kristianp2• 7 years ago

I would imagine Clojure has more use than Lisp. It's a valid question which is better to learn, not one I'm qualified to answer, though. All I would say is that the Clojure community seems more active, and less prickly than the Lisp one.

xvilka• 7 years ago

They still do not provide a per-subscription API for integration, which is plain stupid for 2019. It would be awesome to have it integrated with Vim, Emacs, whatever you like.

mises• 7 years ago

You could probably just crack open the browser extension, prettify it, and send a few sample requests to get the hang of whatever API is used pretty quickly. I doubt it will provide one, as there aren't many users demanding it.

RodgerTheGreat• 7 years ago

Grammarly is essentially an opt-in keylogger for your browser. To put it generously, it is hilariously insecure by design. Furthermore, I don't believe that most of their users understand that the plugin "phones home" continuously to function.

Hey, at least the developers get to tinker with fun languages while spying on people!

eukaryote31• 7 years ago

How long before Google acquires Grammarly for the data?

ebiester• 7 years ago

While true, I believe the whole intent is to use machine learning on real text to improve the customer's experience. For the customer, this is a feature rather than the bug. It is not how I would prefer to interface with grammar checking, mind you, but I think they have been transparent.

reaperducer3• 7 years ago

Does anyone in the HN crowd know of any other brand-name orgs using Lisp?

wglb• 7 years ago

The lispwork page http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/ has some that are specific to lispworks. Some also (with possible overlap) at https://lisp-lang.org/success/. Allegro Common Lisp success stories: https://franz.com/success/. ITA (now part of Google) https://www.itasoftware.com/

reaperducer3• 7 years ago

Thanks for the lists. Aside from ITA and Northwestern University, most of those were new to me. I was kinda hoping for some big commonly-known brands.

I'm trying to convince my boss to let me learn Lisp on company time.

sli• 7 years ago

Apple, eBay, Intuit, Oracle, and Red Hat (among many large and smaller-but-still-largish companies) use Clojure according to the Clojure site.

https://clojure.org/community/companies

chrisperkins2• 7 years ago

Another related link - https://clojure.org/community/success_stories

p_l• 7 years ago

OSX sandboxing uses Scheme48 under the hood.

jonathankoren3• 7 years ago

When I was there, the A/B framework developed at LinkedIn was in Closure, and you you could even download your segment as a sexpr.

methehack3• 7 years ago

It has been said that HN itself runs on Arc, based on Racket, a scheme/lisp. Paul Graham is a big lisp head.

kristianp2• 7 years ago

I believe Cisco has used Scheme, having bought the Chez Scheme company (then in 2016 open-sourcing Chez). I've also seen a blog/twitter post from a Cisco guy about Clojure.

Exuma• 7 years ago

This sounds kind of like an absolutely miserable experience. Can someone point out why a company would choose lisp over some other language which is just as fast performance wise?

TurboHaskal4• 7 years ago

There aren’t many dynamic languages with that level of performance and maturity.

Their problem wasn’t choosing Lisp, but not paying for ACL :)

jonathankoren3• 7 years ago

Allegro is nice. It’s fast, and has a great development environment. I used it all the time years ago.

I recently decided to screw around with Lisp again and have been using SBCL with Atom via the Slime plugin, but it’s not very good. I can’t evaluate functions from the editor, nor can I copy-paste multiline functions into the repl. It’s very frustrating.

throwanem• 7 years ago

Dealing with a bug in the language implementation is almost always a miserable experience, and all implementations have them; SBCL isn't unique or even unusual in this respect. Where it, and other Common Lisp implementations with similarly mature tooling, are indeed unusual and exceptional is in the unparalleled flexibility they offer to inspect, introspect, and instrument running code in real time, without having to so much as restart the system under inspection, and also without the constant headaches of something like gdb and its often flaky translation of byte slaw into symbolic structures.

There's a goodly number of reasons not to choose Common Lisp for production, not least of which is that engineers skilled and familiar with the language can be hard to find. Debuggability, though, is not among them.

mnemonicsloth• 7 years ago

The long and the short of it is that lisp, for all its faults, is superior to commonly used programming languages in most cases.

It's almost as fast and way, way more expressive than C, C++ and Java.

It's still more expressive and 100x faster than Perl, Python, Ruby.

It's the expressivity that hooks you in, in my experience. Once you've gotten used to programming with macros (code rewriting programs), the thought of programming without them seems almost as bad as programming without functions.

bjoli• 7 years ago

Because languages with the same speed are generally a lot less flexible. If you have access to allegro CL or LispWorks and you and your team know CL you must have some very good reasons not to use it.

SBCL (the implementation they use) was(is?) known to have a pretty bad GC situation.

beastcoast• 7 years ago

At Amazon I’ve seen Clojure used successfully as a DSL in a larger service. The scaffolding is Java and the DSL parts are Clojure.

chrisperkins2• 7 years ago

Being a client-server application, it allows to run its backend on the remote machine and connect to it from your local Emacs (or Vim, if you must, with SLIMV).

I have used Slimv and found it quite enjoyable on Vim. Has anyone here tried Vlime? Has anyone tried both? Which one of the two do you recommend?

Running Lisp in Production (2015)

Related Stories