Comment by kenjackson

I'd put ITA, ViaWeb, and a handful of others in the notable category. Although all I know about ITA is what they do (at a USA Today level), its Lisp (at the very least a large majority), and that they were bought by Google. Maybe ITA can be promoted to the Emacs level?

That vendor list is a nice reference, but I wouldn't be surprised if the D programming language vendor list was near that size. And no one uses D. Just imagine a similar list for virtually any other language commonly discussed on HN, from C/C++, to Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Javascript. I'd be surprised if Smalltalk wasn't 10x the size.

Don't get me wrong, I think its a great language. I just don't think any language gives the benefits that so many people seem to think they do, at least not general purpose languages. DSLs? Sure, they can give huge multipliers -- in their domain or maybe even for a specific domain. But not in general (and maybe those knowledge-intensive apps are those for which the multiplier is higher).