June 30, 2010

Lisp in startups

Calgary-area Lisper Warren Wilkinson recently launched FormLis, a Lisp-powered web application that combines a wiki with an ingeniously easy way to create custom forms (backed by a schemaless database that automatically manages form definition changes). One of the interesting technical details is Warren's use of an embedded Forth to Lisp compiler. Doug Hoyte's Let Over Lambda (read my review of the latter) features a Forth to Lisp compiler as a case-study chapter, but it's interesting to see one used in a real application.

In other news, ITA Software is trying to get acquired by Google for a billion dollars.