What are the main dialects of Lisp in use today?
Executive summary
The modern Lisp landscape is dominated by a handful of active dialect families—Common Lisp, Scheme (and its offshoots such as Racket and Chicken), Clojure, and smaller but influential variants like Emacs Lisp and PicoLisp—each serving different communities and use cases [1] [2] [3]. Reporting and community discussion emphasize Clojure’s growth and tooling, Scheme’s pedagogical purity, and Common Lisp’s standardized ecosystem, but available sources also show a long tail of niche Lisps and implementation diversity [4] [5] [6].
1. Common Lisp: the industrial, standardized Lisp
Common Lisp is the ANSI‑standardized vision of Lisp used where a broad, mature feature set and multiple commercial and open implementations matter; the language was unified in the 1980s and formalized by ANSI in 1994, and it remains the canonical “large” Lisp with distinct constructs and an emphasized standard library and extensions [2] [5]. Conversations among programmers routinely point to Common Lisp for serious application work and exploration of Lisp’s macro and object systems, and community advice often frames it as the dialect that best represents classic Lisp in practice [4] [7].
2. Scheme and its descendants: the academic and minimal core
Scheme is routinely described as “clean” and pedagogically focused, deliberately smaller than Common Lisp and favored in education and language research for its minimalism and functional orientation; classic texts and community recommendations highlight Scheme’s simplicity as an advantage for learning core ideas [4] [2]. From that core have sprung implementations and related languages—Racket as a rich, modern platform descended from Scheme, and Chicken Scheme as a practical, high‑performance implementation—each extending Scheme’s philosophy for different audiences and deployment targets [1] [6].
3. Clojure: the modern JVM‑centric Lisp
Clojure is the modern, JVM‑oriented Lisp that rekindled mainstream interest in Lisp concepts by marrying persistent data structures and concurrency primitives to the Java ecosystem, and reporting consistently points to Clojure as a major reason Lisp ideas have regained broader attention [4] [1]. Community threads and guides contrast Clojure’s pragmatic ties to the JVM with Scheme’s and Common Lisp’s different priorities, and note tradeoffs such as the lack of general tail‑call optimization on the JVM and the presence of language‑specific features like recur for controlled recursion [4].
4. Emacs Lisp and domain‑specific Lisps
Emacs Lisp occupies a distinct niche as the extension language for the GNU Emacs editor: its value is often measured less by general‑purpose language design than by how well it lets users script and extend Emacs, and some commentators question how much transferable “advanced” functional technique is learned from it beyond editor customization [4]. Beyond Emacs Lisp, niche but practical dialects such as PicoLisp, Maru and many community projects listed in curated collections reflect a vibrant ecosystem of small Lisps aimed at specific goals like compactness, embedded scripting, or interop with C/Java [3].
5. Popularity, tooling narratives, and the long tail
Public perception of “which Lisp to learn” is shaped by community discussions and site polls where Clojure often features prominently because of tooling, corporate use, and JVM access, while Scheme and Common Lisp are recommended for pedagogy and classic Lisp features respectively; hacker‑forum threads and Stack Overflow answers mirror these emphases but vary with the respondent’s background and priorities [7] [4] [8]. Curated lists and ranking sites show many more dialects and implementations—underscoring that beyond the main families there is a long tail of experimental and specialized Lisps that continue to evolve [3] [6].
6. Limits of available reporting
The sources surveyed catalog major dialects, community advice, and curated lists, but they do not provide comprehensive usage statistics or enterprise adoption metrics across all dialects, so any claim about absolute “most used” dialect requires additional empirical data not present in these reports [1] [2] [6]. Where reporting highlights trends—Clojure’s rise, Scheme’s pedagogical role, Common Lisp’s maturity—those are reinforced by developer discussions and curated resources but should be read as community perspectives rather than hard market share figures [4] [7].