[brlewis]

I definitely include linters, not just style formatters.

> It happens even in fairly rigid languages like Java, I can't imagine what you'd end up with Lisp.

I imagine it would be about the same, with human factors dominating. If Lisp's flexibility pushed in the direction of inconsistency, the ease with which you could write codemods for Lisp would push in the direction of consistency.

> Has there ever even been any Lisp-based company with a 20+ year old codebase where a cast of tens of thousands of developers have worked on it over the years? I can't think of any but maybe I haven't heard of it.

I haven't heard of any either. If you hear about one, LMK if they're hiring.

[tonyarkles]

While ITA no longer exists as a separate entity I don’t think, my understanding is that they pretty much wrote everything in Lisp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software

https://franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/itastory...

Grammarly too, although I don’t think it qualifies as a 20-year codebase: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p...

[farray]

ITA started doing everything in Lisp, but especially as the original coding founder left, started hiring people doing stuff in Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, shell, C++, PL/SQL, etc.

The core software was still Common Lisp, but lots of cruft got added, and Conway's Law kicked in mightily.