Peter Christensen

pchristensen.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007

Peter Christensen writes about Lisp, startups, and programming, and maintains a well-known list of companies using Lisp.

What HN saysCommenters cite his Lisp companies list as a standard reference, and link his posts on Hacker News itself and a book review.
20HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
40stories submitted
501story points
1 year agolast shared
2007people per year2026

Most-shared posts

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    How To Learn Lisp
    3 people · 34 points · first shared 2008 · 11 comments on HN
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    Hey language snobs: don't pinch pennies
    2 people · 61 points · first shared 2008 · 29 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Hacker vs Engineer - Know The Difference!
    2 people · 24 points · first shared 2008 · 29 comments on HN
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    Can Y Combinator Be Beaten At Its Own Game?
    2 people · 21 points · first shared 2008 · 17 comments on HN
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    What Kind of Software Would People Actually Pay For?
    2 people · 12 points · first shared 2008 · 4 comments on HN
  8. 8
    Pumping Startup Iron: Be an Arnold, Not a Lou
    2 people · 6 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
  9. 9
    Why We’re Not In A Startup Bubble
    2 people · 5 points · first shared 2008 · 1 comments on HN
  10. 10
    Understanding the Clojure Development Ecosystem
    2 people · 4 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
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    A Closed Apple Platform is Inevitable But Temporary
    2 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
  12. 12
    Advice to a college sophomore programmer
    1 people · 61 points · first shared 2011 · 25 comments on HN
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    Critical Fans (or how Mixergy did the Impossible)
    1 people · 52 points · first shared 2010 · 9 comments on HN
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    Ultimate N00b SLIME/Emacs Cheat Sheet
    1 people · 30 points · first shared 2008 · 21 comments on HN
  15. 15
    Chrome, the Google Docs-mobile
    1 people · 26 points · first shared 2008 · 7 comments on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

pchristensen · 2013-12-14
Wrote up my thoughts on DM: http://pchristensen.com/blog/articles/meteor-discovered/ tl;dr: A+ tech book that I wish every tech writer would read and take to heart, plus Meteor looks great.
vindarel · 2021-10-11
yeah but this list was started for CL. At that time we only had http://pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/, and people giving the same 3 examples. Clojure always had good promotion and it already has https://clojure.org/community/companies
tlrobinson · 2018-08-10
And... Hacker News. I can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure pg talked about how Hacker News was, at least initially, REPL-centric (not in those words) EDIT: http://pchristensen.com/blog/articles/are-you-this-agile-paul-graham-c… > This is a step beyond that. I'm not even doing releases; I've been pasting the changes into the running server's repl. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99586 Obviously it's a bit extreme to be hacking on the production site with no version control etc, but HN was a lot smaller back then.
nimeshneema · 2013-11-07
From Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski: A fair number of large companies do use Lisp for some serious work. A long list of Industrial Lisp projects can be found at http://pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/
nswanberg · 2012-05-20
Good call. Michael Ellsberg wrote a book with that same premise. Here's a review: http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/education-of-millionaires/ (there's also a link to a related Mixergy interview there) The book doesn't say how to provide jobs for everyone, for someone who needs a nudge in the right direction it could be very helpful, likely the same sort that would create a site like "IWillMopItUp.com".
zck · 2011-08-29
Here's a list of companies using Lisp in production: http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/ . pg also has a list of Lisp applications: http://paulgraham.com/apps.html
chris11 · 2009-02-15
Orbitz has used it for awhile. See http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html. I found over 50 companies that also use it. http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/
raju · 2008-07-22
There are some good beginner books on Lisp, and there have been several discussions before. Two books come to my mind, PCL and "Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation", both for the Lisp beginner. I have read most of PCL and really liked it. I have just begun to read Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation and so far, am really liking it. Both are freely available on the net, so you have nothing to lose to try them out. PCL - http://gigamonkeys.com/book/ Gentle Intro to Sym Comp - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html Reference links - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125766 http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/how-to-learn-lisp/ Hope this helps. Good luck!

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