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Common Lisp

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Common Lisp vs Elixir: What are the differences?

Common Lisp: The modern, multi-paradigm, high-performance, compiled, ANSI-standardized descendant of the long-running family of Lisp programming languages. Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]; Elixir: Dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications. Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

Common Lisp and Elixir can be primarily classified as "Languages" tools.

"Flexibility" is the primary reason why developers consider Common Lisp over the competitors, whereas "Concurrency" was stated as the key factor in picking Elixir.

Elixir is an open source tool with 15.6K GitHub stars and 2.22K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Elixir's open source repository on GitHub.

Poll Everywhere, NoRedInk, and Resultados Digitais are some of the popular companies that use Elixir, whereas Common Lisp is used by Real Softservice, NG Informática, and Platform Project. Elixir has a broader approval, being mentioned in 177 company stacks & 190 developers stacks; compared to Common Lisp, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.

Decisions about Common Lisp and Elixir

#rust #elixir So am creating a messenger with voice call capabilities app which the user signs up using phone number and so at first i wanted to use Actix so i learned Rust so i thought to myself because well its first i felt its a bit immature to use actix web even though some companies are using Rust but we cant really say the full potential of Rust in a full scale app for example in Discord both Elixir and Rust are used meaning there is equal need for them but for Elixir so many companies use it from Whatsapp, Wechat, etc and this means something for Rust is not ready to go full scale we cant assume all this possibilities when it come Rust. So i decided to go the Erlang way after alot of Thinking so Do you think i made the right decision?Am 19 year programmer so i assume am not experienced as you so your answer or comment would really valuable to me

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Timm Stelzer
VP Of Engineering at Flexperto GmbH · | 18 upvotes · 651.7K views

We have a lot of experience in JavaScript, writing our services in NodeJS allows developers to transition to the back end without any friction, without having to learn a new language. There is also the option to write services in TypeScript, which adds an expressive type layer. The semi-shared ecosystem between front and back end is nice as well, though specifically NodeJS libraries sometimes suffer in quality, compared to other major languages.

As for why we didn't pick the other languages, most of it comes down to "personal preference" and historically grown code bases, but let's do some post-hoc deduction:

Go is a practical choice, reasonably easy to learn, but until we find performance issues with our NodeJS stack, there is simply no reason to switch. The benefits of using NodeJS so far outweigh those of picking Go. This might change in the future.

PHP is a language we're still using in big parts of our system, and are still sometimes writing new code in. Modern PHP has fixed some of its issues, and probably has the fastest development cycle time, but it suffers around modelling complex asynchronous tasks, and (on a personal note) lack of support for writing in a functional style.

We don't use Python, Elixir or Ruby, mostly because of personal preference and for historic reasons.

Rust, though I personally love and use it in my projects, would require us to specifically hire for that, as the learning curve is quite steep. Its web ecosystem is OK by now (see https://www.arewewebyet.org/), but in my opinion, it is still no where near that of the other web languages. In other words, we are not willing to pay the price for playing this innovation card.

Haskell, as with Rust, I personally adore, but is simply too esoteric for us. There are problem domains where it shines, ours is not one of them.

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Pros of Common Lisp
Pros of Elixir
  • 24
    Flexibility
  • 22
    High-performance
  • 17
    Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL
  • 13
    Stable
  • 12
    Lisp
  • 8
    Code is data
  • 6
    Can integrate with C (via CFFI)
  • 6
    Multi paradigm
  • 5
    Lisp is fun
  • 4
    Macros
  • 4
    Easy Setup
  • 3
    Parentheses
  • 3
    Open source
  • 3
    Purelly functional
  • 3
    Elegant
  • 1
    DSLs
  • 1
    Multiple values
  • 1
    CLOS/MOP
  • 1
    Clean semantics
  • 1
    Will still be relevant 100 years from now
  • 1
    Still decades ahead of almost all programming languages
  • 1
    Best programming language
  • 1
    Simple syntax
  • 1
    Powerful
  • 1
    Generic functions
  • 1
    Can implement almost any feature as a library
  • 1
    Formal specification, multiple implementations
  • 174
    Concurrency
  • 162
    Functional
  • 133
    Erlang vm
  • 113
    Great documentation
  • 105
    Great tooling
  • 87
    Immutable data structures
  • 81
    Open source
  • 77
    Pattern-matching
  • 62
    Easy to get started
  • 59
    Actor library
  • 32
    Functional with a neat syntax
  • 29
    Ruby inspired
  • 25
    Erlang evolved
  • 24
    Homoiconic
  • 22
    Beauty of Ruby, Speed of Erlang/C
  • 17
    Fault Tolerant
  • 14
    Simple
  • 13
    High Performance
  • 11
    Doc as first class citizen
  • 11
    Good lang
  • 11
    Pipe Operator
  • 9
    Stinkin' fast, no memory leaks, easy on the eyes
  • 9
    Fun to write
  • 8
    OTP
  • 8
    Resilient to failure
  • 6
    GenServer takes the guesswork out of background work
  • 4
    Pattern matching
  • 4
    Not Swift
  • 4
    Idempotence
  • 4
    Fast, Concurrent with clean error messages
  • 3
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Dynamic Typing
  • 2
    Error isolation

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Cons of Common Lisp
Cons of Elixir
  • 4
    Too many Parentheses
  • 3
    Standard did not evolve since 1994
  • 2
    Small library ecosystem
  • 2
    No hygienic macros
  • 1
    Inadequate community infrastructure
  • 1
    Ultra-conservative community
  • 11
    Fewer jobs for Elixir experts
  • 7
    Smaller userbase than other mainstream languages
  • 5
    Elixir's dot notation less readable ("object": 1st arg)
  • 4
    Dynamic typing
  • 2
    Difficult to understand
  • 1
    Not a lot of learning books available

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What is Common Lisp?

Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]

What is Elixir?

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

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What companies use Common Lisp?
What companies use Elixir?
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What tools integrate with Common Lisp?
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Blog Posts

Oct 24 2019 at 7:43PM

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What are some alternatives to Common Lisp and Elixir?
Clojure
Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.
Haskell
It is a general purpose language that can be used in any domain and use case, it is ideally suited for proprietary business logic and data analysis, fast prototyping and enhancing existing software environments with correct code, performance and scalability.
Python
Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
Racket
It is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. It is also used for scripting, computer science education, and research.
Java
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!
See all alternatives