Last Updated: 5/19/2008

Everyone says “Nobody uses Lisp” and Lispers say “Yes they do, there’s ITA, and, um, Autocad, and, uh, oh yeah, Paul Graham wrote Viaweb in Lisp!” Not very helpful for either side. It’s about time there was a better resource. In true Lispy fashion, I decided to roll my own rather than look for one that someone else did better. I think I can do a pretty good job because I wanted a page like this to put my new startup on once I actually do the development 🙂 Please use the Contact Me page to send me additional companies that you know of. Please include as much as possible about the founders, the role of Lisp, the flavor used, the location, and a blurb about the company. Please let me know if you’d like any of the information to remain off of the list. So here’s my ad-hoc, incomplete list of companies using Lisp or Scheme right now.

North America

Northeast States

Midwest States

SF Bay Area

Northwest States & Vancouver

South

DoneTrading.com – online item trading. Tallahassee, FL. SBCL/Hunchentoot, mention Lisp on their Advantages page

Impact Solutions “Smart Drilling” – real-time analysis of oil rig drilling data. Houston, TX. Four developers, won the Offshore Technology Conference’s “Spotlight on Technology” award.

Montreal, Canada

Western US (outside SF Bay)

Matchcraft – aggregation-based, local Internet advertising – online Yellow Pages. Santa Monica, CA. Previously had a major production system written in Lisp, has several internal tools written in Common Lisp, and is developing new products in Lisp .

Europe

Belgium

PEPITe – manufacturing intelligence, data mining. Angleur, Liege, Belgium. Their product Pepito was featured in the Franz Success Stories page.

Denmark

Mu Aps – Building automatic trading systems. Farum, Denmark. Klaus Habro of Mu Aps wrote the cl-muproc library: Erlang-inspired multi-processing in Common Lisp. Two presentations (both pdf) and a summary. [NOTE: Seems dead – website doesn’t do anything, links to cl-muproc documentation are dead, no activity on mailing list in over a year]

Finland

Steel Bank Studio – SBCL consulting. Helsinki, Finland. One man consulting firm consisting of Nikodemus Siivola, SBCL hacker and co-founder of common-lisp.net.

Germany

Netherlands

Infometrics – Automatic Functional Sizing. Muiderberg, Netherlands. Analyzes requirements and design documents for business software to make a Function Point Analysis. Sole proprietorship (Ernst van Waning) using Allegro/Lispworks.

StreamTech – custom web application development, online advertising and profiling products. The Hague, Netherlands. Hiring programming interns. Common Lisp, about 10 hackers

Norway

Portugal

SISCOG – decision-support systems for resource planning and management in transportation companies. Lisboa, Portugal. Allegro CL since version 5 – before that it was Lucid Lisp.

Sweden

Asia

India

Cleartrip – Indian travel search website. Mumbai, India. “Built almost entirely in ANSI Common Lisp” – data integration, business logic, front end setup. Started with CMUCL but now use ACL. 10 lisp programmers + 5 in training.

Tachyon Technologies – Quill program for typing in Indian languages, and Cspace, an open source p2p communication platform. Bangalore/Chennai, India. Jobs page mentions Common Lisp, Scheme, Lisp Interpreter, Optimizing Compiler, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning. Job page includes coding puzzles!

Japan

Mathematical Systems, Inc – scientific software, computer science, internet solutions, social systems. Tokyo, Japan. Their Car Crash Database System (using Allegro) lets engineers browse over 1TB of numerical, photo, and video data about car crashes to design safer cars (used by Honda). If you know Japanese, they have a page called “Why Common Lisp?” (translation appreciated).

Australia

Memetrics (now part of Accenture) – testing and optimization for digital marketers. Sydney. Includes Alain Picard, frequent poster to Lisp forums. A LispWorks success story. Their XOS Software platform automated marketing tests, making it cheaper and easier to run more tests.

Virtual or Unsure of Location

Raytheon SigLab – a signal processing analysis pipeline for developing algorithms. A LispWorks success story.

Untyped – web applications, custom software development, training. Virtual Office (5 people). PLT Scheme, very good blog

LilyPond – open source music engraving software. Uses Guile Scheme and has a great essay about the hard problem of making printed music look good.

Other Resources

An anonymous poster recommended Jane Street Capital because their job page mentioned familiarity with functional programming languages (including Lisp/Scheme), but Jane Street is well known for using OCaml, not Lisp. They just realize that it’s worth the effort to teach a Lisp programmer OCaml! This is a hand-edited static page for now. If I get a good response and lots of entries, I might make it a dynamic, searchable site. I decided to organize it geographically, but let me know if another order would be better. Please comment or send me an email!