What has Lisp ever done for us?

Flight search (Google's ITA Software), underground planning (SISCOG), CAD software (PTC Creo et all), the Gollum face (Mirai), automation of document extraction, renewable energies resource planning (3E), project management (planisware),

games (Kandria),

Maxima,

a faster pgloader (https://tapoueh.org/blog/2014/05/why-is-pgloader-so-much-fas...),

hackernews (was rewritten to SBCL: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/hacker-news-now-runs-on-...), first reddit…

https://lisp-screenshots.org/

https://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/

also Emacs (for another dialect).

Yeah but apart from SBCL, Viaweb, Hacker News, Emacs, Clojure, Scheme, Racket, garbage collection, macros, homoiconicity, the REPL, S-expressions, symbolic computation, what has Lisp ever done for us?

...booleans, conditional expressions, first-class functions, lambdas, closures, eval...

Booleans? I think some guy named Boole might have prior art...

(Yeah, OK, he didn't have a programming language...)

booleans as values of course.

arguably redundant since GP did say symbolic communication, but Lisp had T before Algol 60 came out

> What has Lisp ever done for us?

phanitathion, roaphs, aqueduphs, mediphine, wphine...

I'm sorry. Couldn't resist - I watch Python and do Lisp. Or the other way around, sometimes. And, no, I'm not from Barthselona.

"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."

- Guy Steele, Java spec co-author

"35 years of Lisping at SISCOG"

https://www.siscog.pt/en-us/blog/35-years-of-lisping-at-sisc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs

https://help.autodesk.com/view/OARX/2024/ENU/?guid=GUID-A0E9...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

I respect Guy Steele immensely, but his view of Java as being halfway to Lisp is sign that he had jumped the shark by that point, and find it hard to take the rest of his work seriously.

The aqueducts!

It's acted as a road-concentrating hub to simplify logistics.