Peter Christensen

Lisp Companies

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

Montreal, Canada

  • AMARC – organization supporting community radio broadcasting. Montreal, Canada. Job page mentions Scheme, web development, and graphics. Uses a Wiki powered by Gauche
  • Carre Technologies – intelligent machines. Montreal, Canada. Main page just lets you send mail, but the site includes a Chicken Scheme extension for Gnu/Octave and a floating point vector and matrix library for Gambit Scheme.
  • Categorical Design Solutions – eLearning, Knowledge Management, multimedia content creation technology and dissemination of contents over the Internet. Montreal, Canada. Listed on MSLUG Home Page, can’t find any more details about Lisp or Scheme usage
  • Idalia – natural language processing technology. Montreal, Canada. Listed on MSLUG Home Page but all jobs mention C++ and not Lisp
  • ISAC Soft – library, learning, and smart card solutions. Montreal, Canada. Listed on MSLUG Home Page, can’t find any more details about Lisp or Scheme usage
  • Kronos, Altitude Division – Montreal, Canada. Listed on MSLUG Home Page, can’t find any more details about Lisp or Scheme usage
  • MetaScoop – consulting and custom development in Scheme. Montreal, Canada. Developed JazzScheme, recently released as Open Source.
  • NuEcho – speech enabled applications. Montreal, Canada. Scheme; Dominique Boucher was the main organizer of the Montreal Scheme/Lisp User Group (MSLUG)
  • Silex Creations – multimedia solutions for avant-garde businesses, audio synthesis. Montreal, Canada. Listed on MSLUG Home Page, can’t find any more details about Lisp or Scheme usage

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

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!