Lisp Success Stories
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
When you discuss the possibility of using Lisp for an application with non-lispers, they frequently dismiss it as "that AI language". Although "AI language" should be considered a compliment, it is often used as a means of eliminating Lisp as an option for "real" applications. When I hear this type of comment, it reminds me of one of Kent Pitman's classic quotes:
"...Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list."There are a number of sources (see the "Sources" links at the bottom of this posting) that one can direct people to in order to disprove the AI-only myth and to point out specific Lisp-based solutions. Unfortunately, there is no single consolidated list of different industry-specific Lisp success stories. To get around this, I have combined links to categories from the different sources into a single list below in order to have a single drill-down point for industry-specific CL applications. (Note: The Franz site already had section links; however, none of the other ones did. Through the wonder that is CLiki, I have added section links to the ALU pages; unfortunately, I can't do the same for the Digitool or Xanalys sites. Therefore, the Digitool and Xanalys links will only take you to their "Success Stories" page and not to the specific "Category" within the page.)
