The big one that I always remember is Crash Bandicoot - Naughty Dog I think had their own version of Scheme and then switched to Racket at some point. Nubank are also a semi-high profile company who use a lot of Clojure.

Of course, if you ditch the "modern" requirements, I'm sure there is more web infrastructure and scripts supported by Common Lisp than people would want to admit. . .

according to any Andy Gavin, the cofounder of Naughty Dog and a MIT AI lab alumni, crash 1, 2 and 3 were written on GOOL/GOAL[0] which was a home-brewed lisp. According to Franz themselves, the language was hosted on allegro common lisp[1]. the language gave him an ability to push ps1 platform to its limits by leveraging the kind of thinking that's part of lisp lore: incremental recompilation of a running ps1 instance using a remote little language written in and hosted on a Common Lisp dynamic environment. the previous sentence describes a poorly understood practice that of a dynamic environment leveraged development that was part of lisp machine and smalltalk machine and a handful of other now forgotten approaches. in a sense crash was not just "written in lisp", it was written leveraging lisp machine like thinking, that Gavin would've been familiar with from his MIT AI days.

when naughty dog got sold, all the remaining Gavin lisp systems were eventually stripped, so that the company for all intents and purposes became a standard c++ shop. some time later some hipsters wired plt scheme[2] as a scripting language for the Naughty Engine 2.0. unlike the original Gavin approach this is not some deep leveraged architectural decision, and it being lisp is pretty irrelevant to the sort of capabilities it provides. imho scripting language for a game engine selection is a lipstick on a pig kind of process, as demonstrated by various basic-like potato languages that came with legendary triple-As.

[0]https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ba... [1]https://franz.com/success/customer_apps/animation_graphics/n... [2]https://www.gameenginebook.com/resources/gdc09-statescriptin...

hajile

It's the Reddit story all over. Lisp devs know Lisp + X, but everyone else only knows X, so we'll use X instead -- even if it's inferior and causes issues down the line.

This isn't really limited to Lisp though. It applies to quite a few languages with the excuse of "market forces" where "market forces" really means "we want to makes sure our devs are easily replaceable cogs" (using a niche language actually pressures both sides to stick together because the dev can't easily find a new job and the company can't easily find a new dev).

lispm

It's slightly different: Naughty Dog had proven that they can deliver commercial successful applications (novel platform games on the Playstation with excellent content) using Lisp. They had their own IDE on top of Common Lisp and as a delivery vehicle a Scheme-like runtime.

They were bought by a much larger C++-Shop (Sony) and were trying to get the benefits from a larger eco-system. In the end they were bought for their talent, their experience, their brand - but not for their technology.

For Naughty Dog it could also have been the right moment, since from a certain point in time the game platforms are getting so complex that making custom inhouse game runtimes may no longer make sense for smaller game studios.

Reddit OTOH had never delivered anything commercially successful in Lisp, little experience with Lisp, but heard that it could be cool. They used unproven tech. Naughty Dog used proven tech and had enough experience to do low-level systems programming for a brand new game platform. Which is really an outstanding achievement. Reddit had only a rough prototype in Lisp, Reddit then switched inhouse to other technology.

The early Reddit in Lisp: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0