• jcr@jlai.luFrançais
    12 hours

    GNU Guile is a dialect of Lisp used by quite a few software.

    https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

    It is the configuration language of the Guix OS, a modern distro (very focused on computer freedom) , also by libraries and software like Gnucash, the GNU Debugger, a GUI toolkit for Gnome also, etc.

    It is not a replacement of C, but can be used like Python.

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    22 hours

    Don’t think the original LISP is used much anymore, but there’s various dialects like Scheme, Racket and Clojure.

    Some examples where it’s used, off the top of my head:

    • Lilypond for when you need your sheet music to be turing-complete. Uses Scheme.
    • Emacs, for configuring the whole editor. (Has an own dialect, Elisp.)
    • GNU Guix, which uses Scheme for configuring the entire operating system.

    Obviously, you can also use them for general software development. A few years ago, I read of some project that used Clojure for a larger backend service, with the author gushing all over the place.
    Some folks are really passionate about the LISPs, but yeah, not terribly popular in the corporate world…

    • lmr0x61@lemmy.mlEnglish
      17 hours

      Guix is such a cool idea, but Nix accomplishes essentially the same thing, and the syntax is much more accessible in a post-JavaScript world. Most programmers nowadays aren’t that familiar with Lisp-like syntax, for better or worse.

      • moonpiedumplings@programming.dev
        6 hours

        I don’t hate on any language’s syntax tbh, but the tooling for nix is absolutely miserable compared to similar.

        People hate on yaml a lot, but I can start typing and then press tab and it completes a whole template for whatever k8s objecy I am trying to make. Having to copy from my other project’s shell.nix/whatever into the new one feels miserable in comparison.

      • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
        12 hours

        I do agree, yeah, although I can certainly also understand LISP fans being annoyed that someone created a custom DSL for something that is adequately solved by the LISPs. I’m also certainly not enamored with the Nix syntax myself, but do find it easier to parse than a million parentheses.

        But yeah, ultimately the complexity of Nix and Guix isn’t in the particular symbols you type out. The complexity comes from them being expression-based (which does make sense for the use-case, but isn’t as familiar as e.g. imperative languages), as well as just having to learn tons of modules for the different things you want to configure…

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
      9 hours

      Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

      Nice.

  • dparticiple@sh.itjust.works
    19 hours

    Years ago (early 2000s) in a product that suffered from poor product management, I worked on a codebase that included some Scheme, and a built-in Scheme interpreter to run it. I always liked the language.I think it might still have a niche in embedded systems and game dev, among other places (I read somewhere that it’s used in satellite software due to being hot reloadable)?