Taken from the
http://www.lispworks.com/products/myths_and_legends.html website:
Who's Using Lisp?
You don't always see it, but Lisp is all around you.
The Web is growing as fast for Lisp as for the rest of the industry. Yahoo! Store includes a WYSIWYG editor for editing your online store through a standard web browser. The editor is written in Common Lisp. Public domain Lisp-based web servers include CL-HTTP, architected by John Mallery at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Some companies consider Lisp technology so valuable that they tend to keep their use of it under wraps; this is often a source of frustration to those wanting to crow about Lisp's successes. But in 1994, in an unusual move, AT&T permitted Harlequin to confirm that they had ``been supplying Lisp consulting services and products to AT&T, in support of AT&T's development of switched virtual circuit capabilities''. Toward this end, Harlequin created a special variant of its LispWorks® system which offers the realtime response necessary to meet AT&T's rigorous needs, even in spite of being a garbage collected system!
Do you use a credit card? It's quite possible there's Lisp technology used when you present your card for authorization. Fraud detection is another area where Lisp has been used with great success.
Tiburon, Inc uses Common Lisp within application products. Its Tiburon LinkEXPLORER (was Xanalys Watson) is a LispWorks application.
In addition to the above specific examples involving internet web services, telecommunications, document translation, credit-card fraud detection, and criminal investigation, Lisp is also used in applications involving financial and investment analysis and tracking stock market trends, airline scheduling, space exploration, process planning and scheduling, robotics, chemistry, medicine, physics.
That's a broad range of uses, but it has an important commonality: each of these areas confronts seriously hard problems. So from this we can evolve a checklist of possible reasons for using Lisp.
