LispForum

I am curios, if there are lisp programmers as members of this forum
or this is a forum of student and people that use lisp as a hobby.

Mostly the latter. Note that, after coding C++ by day, it can be nice to relax with lisp by night.

Most professional CL coders belong to the "old guard". They are occasionally seen on comp.lang.lisp or irc. More frequently seen at live user-group meetings. Many have tired and no longer answer noobish questions.

And of course many professional Lisp programmers use commercial implementations like Lispworks and Allegro which have their own communities.

I use Common Lisp exclusively. But... I work for myself and it is all custom data processing code. I'm currently wrapping up a GUI for one of the codes so that I can hand it off to a client for use in-house. I use LispWorks on Windows 7 for the GUI version to hand off to the client. My custom code has been on SBCL on Linux. Do to client pressures, I'm switching everything over to LispWorks on Windows 7, but have aspirations of contributing to SBCL working better on Windows 7. SBCL is very Linux-centric.

~ Tom

I use Common Lisp a little bit at work (Traffic consulting ), but the majority of my coding is hobby related.

Traffic consulting sounds like fun. Is it a little like a game?

I've worked with Common Lisp with other CL programmers. But not recently, and am not particularly interested in programming with it.

If you need help with a commercial endeavor, it might be worthwhile to contact Lispworks or Allegro because they're business-oriented. Lispworks' forum is very helpful. Allegro asks for a chunk of revenue which scares some people off, but I've never heard a serious analysis of why that isn't a good investment.

(Maybe Lispworks or Allegro are not a good investment for someone's situation, but the analysis needs to be made. Consider that nearly all managers are inefficient with programmer time, which can easily dwarf tool costs.)

Lisp is a tool that's useful when its particular strengths are needed.

Personally, I use it sometimes in my CS research, in cases where self-creating code is an important part of efficiency (ex. stringing together a huge library of function pointers in C++ and calling them in a complex way would kill me, and at least be terribly ugly -- why not just build a new lambda expression that processes them naturally?). Sometimes I regret it, when I realize it would have taken my half as long to do the same thing in a purely procedural language. But at least half of that is my own lack of experience with functional programming.

Does anybody use a star-shaped screwdriver in their work, or is it an academic curiosity? Of course it's more than a curiosity -- it's just not something you'll use as often as other tools.

Siggy