Lisp Jobs
Mark Conlin
Do any of you write LISP code for a living ?
Who do you work for ?
--
mec --gt2863a
Joachim Achtzehnter
Well, as a matter of fact, right now I am writing Lisp code and get
paid doing it. So there are Lisp jobs. But I'm also writing C++ and C
code, and SQL is thrown in as well here and there. You are well
advised to become experienced in at least one mainstream language, if
not several.
My advise to anybody who wants to enter the software field is to learn
programming rather than "a programming language". Every language gives
you a different point of view, and limiting yourself to only one is
not a good idea. If anything, knowing only one, you are not in a good
position to decide which one is best suited for a given project. Sure,
it is possible to write any program in any general-purpose language,
but people who religiously insist that one particular language is the
answer to everything are rather misguided IMHO.
The above considerations are rather independent of the issue of
finding jobs. Talking about jobs specificly, it should be obvious that
there are far more employers looking for people with C++ or Java
experience than Lisp or Prolog. By limiting yourself to a less-used
language you are giving up many potentially interesting and lucrative
employment opportunities.
Joachim
--
private: joa...@kraut.bc.ca (http://www.kraut.bc.ca)
work: joa...@mercury.bc.ca (http://www.mercury.bc.ca)
Reini Urban
>Is it possible to get a job writing Lisp code ?
any commercial program niche with a lisp api is fantastic.
AutoCAD (AutoLISP) and ICAD (Allegro CL) are the only ones to my
knowledge. but there certainly exist a lot more of specialized programs
which must be maintained and customized in LISP
(commercial robots? expert systems on the oil or medical industry?
nasa?)
emacs, if you really need it's features and persuade your boss that
emacs is needed. anybody got paid for elisp code?
>Do any of you write LISP code for a living ?
I sell more programs written in lisp (>20) than c++ (0), c (1), perl
(3), pascal (1), java (0) or python (1).
I make my living with lisp only. some kind of niche. :)
>Who do you work for ?
freelancer. anybody who needs a small problem to be solved easily.
most of these small problems can easily be generalized to a one year job
:)
but best are the BIG companies which pay reliably and fast. they have
more foresight and more users, but a worse working climate. (mostly)
---
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/autocad/news/faq/autolisp.html
Bill Anderson
>
> Is it possiblt to get a job writing Lisp code ?
>
> Do any of you write LISP code for a living ?
>
>
> mec --gt2863a
>
YES it's possilbe to get a job writing LISP code! I've been doing it for
12 years, and during that time we have had constant openings at all
levels for LISP programmers (and still do)!
I don't know how many times we've (formerly Mystech Associates, we just
got bought) sent announcements to the lisp-jobs mailing list as well as
posting them to this and the other lisp news groups. Result, maybe one
or two inquiries. Granted, many people either can't or don't want to
work on defense programs, let alone move to the D.C. area, but we've
been doing fun and interesting stuff. It's a fairly large system (about
300,000 lines) in ANSI CL and CLIM on Symbolics machines, Open Genera on
Dec Alphas, and Harlequin on Unix boxes. (quite a few of us have our own
Symbolics machines at home as well)
For us, one of the harder sells to both the customer and to management
to keep using LISP was the inability to find and hire LISP programmers,
or to even find entry level people who were willing to be trained in
LISP.
If you're interested in more info on either the project or LISP job
openings, please feel free to email me.
-ba
--
___________________________________________________________
_ /| William C. (Bill) Anderson
'o.O' Chief Scientist, Sterling Software
=(___)= Federal Systems Group, Tactical Systems Div.
U <http://www.sterling.com/>
ACKK!PTT! current work place: <mailto:b...@mcs.mds.lmco.com>
Mike McDonald
Bill Anderson <b...@mcs.mds.lmco.com> writes:
> Mark Conlin wrote:
>>
>> Is it possiblt to get a job writing Lisp code ?
>>
>> Do any of you write LISP code for a living ?
>>
>> Who do you work for ?
>>
>> --
>> mec --gt2863a
>>
>
> YES it's possilbe to get a job writing LISP code! I've been doing it for
> 12 years, and during that time we have had constant openings at all
> levels for LISP programmers (and still do)!
>
> I don't know how many times we've (formerly Mystech Associates, we just
> got bought) sent announcements to the lisp-jobs mailing list as well as
> posting them to this and the other lisp news groups. Result, maybe one
> or two inquiries. Granted, many people either can't or don't want to
> work on defense programs, let alone move to the D.C. area, but we've
> been doing fun and interesting stuff.
DOD is OK if a "bit" bureaucratic. DC area is expensive. Sterling's had a
reputation for paying below the going rates for software types. Has that
changed?
> It's a fairly large system (about
> 300,000 lines) in ANSI CL and CLIM on Symbolics machines, Open Genera on
> Dec Alphas, and Harlequin on Unix boxes. (quite a few of us have our own
> Symbolics machines at home as well)
Hey! I got on of those at home! Does that qualify me? :-)
> For us, one of the harder sells to both the customer and to management
> to keep using LISP was the inability to find and hire LISP programmers,
> or to even find entry level people who were willing to be trained in
> LISP.
All it takes is MONEY!!! :-)
> current work place: <mailto:b...@mcs.mds.lmco.com>
Ew! Yuck! You're working at LockMart. Who were you before LockMart bought
you out? Not Mystech but the group you're working for?
Mike McDonald
mik...@mikemac.com
David Bakhash
> emacs, if you really need it's features and persuade your boss that
> emacs is needed. anybody got paid for elisp code?
hells yeah. I wrote a package for Emacs once and got paid $1100 bucks
for it. That's about it. Never got paid for writing strokes.el, but
I think that when people write to me and tell me they like strokes,
that's pay enough. writing lisp is a pleasure.
dave
(p.s. I bet the guys at Franz that wrote the fi interface package for
Allegro CL/(X)Emacs got paid pretty nice.
dave
Bill Anderson
>
> In article <35DC2DA5...@mcs.mds.lmco.com>,
> Bill Anderson <b...@mcs.mds.lmco.com> writes:
> > Mark Conlin wrote:
> >>
> >> Is it possiblt to get a job writing Lisp code ?
> >>
> >> Do any of you write LISP code for a living ?
> >>
> >> Who do you work for ?
> >>
> >> --
> >> mec --gt2863a
> >>
> >
> > YES it's possilbe to get a job writing LISP code! I've been doing it for
> > 12 years, and during that time we have had constant openings at all
> > levels for LISP programmers (and still do)!
> >
> > I don't know how many times we've (formerly Mystech Associates, we just
> > got bought) sent announcements to the lisp-jobs mailing list as well as
> > posting them to this and the other lisp news groups. Result, maybe one
> > or two inquiries. Granted, many people either can't or don't want to
> > work on defense programs, let alone move to the D.C. area, but we've
> > been doing fun and interesting stuff.
>
> DOD is OK if a "bit" bureaucratic. DC area is expensive. Sterling's had a
> reputation for paying below the going rates for software types. Has that
> changed?
good question, our company, Mystech, was just bought by them two months
ago, i guess i'll find out come raise time :-) although, we became a new
division under their federal systems group and they claim, at least,
that the divisions have a lot of autonomy.
>
> > It's a fairly large system (about
> > 300,000 lines) in ANSI CL and CLIM on Symbolics machines, Open Genera on
> > Dec Alphas, and Harlequin on Unix boxes. (quite a few of us have our own
> > Symbolics machines at home as well)
>
> Hey! I got on of those at home! Does that qualify me? :-)
unfortunately, basically, no. the "bureaucrats" don't take kindly to
people taking classified work home :-)
>
> > For us, one of the harder sells to both the customer and to management
> > to keep using LISP was the inability to find and hire LISP programmers,
> > or to even find entry level people who were willing to be trained in
> > LISP.
>
> All it takes is MONEY!!! :-)
personally, i'm waiting for ed mcmahon to call.
>
> > current work place: <mailto:b...@mcs.mds.lmco.com>
>
> Ew! Yuck! You're working at LockMart. Who were you before LockMart bought
> you out? Not Mystech but the group you're working for?
my feelings exactly, actually i'm "on sight" on another project (it's
C++, another Ew Yuck, btw just when will the rest of the cs community
catch on and use a "modern" language like lisp? :-). the lisp work is
NOT, i repeat NOT under "LockMart". we're just one of several
subcontractors here at this sight on this project.
>
> Mike McDonald
> mik...@mikemac.com
-ba
Jeff Dalton
> Is it possiblt to get a job writing Lisp code ?
Yes.
> Do any of you write LISP code for a living ?
I do, though these days I also have to write Java. (I have, so far,
been able to fight off C++, but it's sometimes been difficult to do so.)
> Who do you work for ?
The University of Edinburgh.
-- jd
Erik Naggum
| Is it possiblt to get a job writing Lisp code?
yes, but the Lisp code itself is not the real issue -- solving problems
that are intractable or unaffordable without Lisp is one. another is
making functionally sophisticated solutions available for less money than
the often graphically sophisticated but otherwise trivial solutions that
the market is choked with.
| Do any of you write LISP code for a living?
yes. for the past two years, now, I haven't had to work in any of the
languages _claimed_ to be the customer's choice, such as C++ or Perl.
(I have instead replaced half-working solutions in those languages with
fully functional solutions in Common Lisp.)
| Who do you work for?
various parts of the financial markets in Oslo, from the Stock Exchange
to a financial news agency. I do servers and fundamental technology, not
user interface stuff. it would have been called "systems programming" a
few years ago. unlike what many appear to believe, traditional "systems
programming" languages, such as C, C++, Perl, etc, are unsuited for their
tasks, but it takes a change of focus on your problems to see why they
actually _fail_ to deliver, despite their overwhelming "success stories".
systems programming is about providing services to a host of applications,
but as applications change, they pose new demands on the system, which
it needs to adapt to provide. when the application programmer instead
has to turn to systems-level hackery to get a needed service, we're not
talking about "powerful" languages because they can do this, we're
talking about _dirt_poor_ languages that make you _have_ to in the first
place. Common Lisp provides a means to make very powerful abstractions
available as services to people who really care about correctness and
speed in the right places, and to adapt them quickly while maintaining
the correctness.
the markets where this is true are not the markets to which Microsoft is
selling its shoddy software, and thus it takes a little effort to find it
and also some experience to answer their cries for help, but only when
you start to see what kind of problems _vanish_ when you program in
Common Lisp, can you appreciate why people are still struggling with so
many _unsolved_ problems elsewhere, employing ever more C++ programmers
to keep the _real_ problems unsolved and cure only obvious symptoms. as
you can imagine, once you get people to believe that _only_ the symptoms
can be cured and that the problems are fundamentally unsolvable, you will
have a wonderful marketplace that never runs dry of the trivial problems
you get more and more experience "solving" over and over again. if you
_really_ solve a problem, you won't need to solve it again. there's no
market in that. in fact, there's unemployment in that for at least half
the software industry, and although most of the people who would be out
of work are young and smart enough to make a living doing something else,
they will still resist you with everything they got, and invent problems
that only they can solve with their particular tools and mindset.
the funny part is that it isn't hard to find people who will listen, but
you cannot talk to the masses. it's got to be a few people at a time,
because this is about losing one's religion -- the false belief that no
software can ever satisfy the customer's demands, the ever increasing
false belief in promises of the next version ("life after death", "for
our children's children", etc), and the ever increasing attitude that the
last version was a piece of shit. losing that religion is hard for many
people -- it'a too easy to believe that what you promise those who would
shuffle off the upgrade coil is just another religion, but if you get
really good software, you don't need to upgrade, and the software stays
current and valuable for years to come. Common Lisp is like that. you
just have to find people who don't _expect_ to throw your software out
mere months after they got it. that's who Lisp programmers work for.
incidentally, I believe Microsoft has a world-wide campaign these days
(at least they have a campaign in Norway that looks like those dubbed
commercials for shampoo and toothpaste and whatever that fit Europe in
general but no country in particular) in which we are told that "Windows
98" is a medicine against headaches. _which_ headache? wasn't it sold
to the target audience by Microsoft itself under the name "Windows 95"?
#:Erik
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David J Cooper Jr
Yes, I have been using Allegro CL (in conjunction with ICAD/IDL) for over
4 years now (as my full-time job), and currently run my own company
(Genworks) specialized in implementing engineering software with
ICAD/IDL.
We are modeling geometric and mechanical systems, as well as
manufacturing process planning systems, in ways which I could not imagine
possible using mundane languages. In similar spirit to what Erik Naggum
mentioned, I have many examples of replacing half-working systems built
from tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of C (or PL/I, in a recent
case) with fully-functional systems of a few thousand lines of IDL (which
is a macro extension embedded in Allegro CL).
Currently there is a Java-based UI toolkit for ICAD which runs through
CORBA, I haven't quite got into that yet, but my inclination is to do as
much as possible on the server side using just Lisp and IDL (through
enablers like CL-HTTP).
I expect there will be continuing demand, at least in the Automotive and
Aerospace industries for good enthusiastic Lisp fanatics (don't everyone
come running to Detroit all at once, now -- but I hear Seattle is kind of
rainy, and Detroit isn't nearly as bad as its reputation makes it out to
be... :)
Anyway, I feel the use of Lisp and things like ICAD/IDL is still in its
infancy in mechanical design and engineering, but I think the industry
around here will gradually be able to absorb more and more good Lisp
people. I know KTI in Southfield, MI (the vendor of ICAD)
(www.ktiworld.com) has been looking for people recently, I'm not sure
what their headcount budget is like right now. I believe their main
strategy is to bring in either highly experienced ICAD people, or fresh
young whippersnappers from university and train them up. But I'm sure
they would be interested to talk to anyone who is a true Lisp fanatic.
Genworks will probably be needing to staff up in the not-too-distant
future as well... :)
--
David J Cooper Jr Genworks International
dcoo...@genworks.com http://www.genworks.com
...Embracing an Open Systems Approach to Knowledge-based Engineering...