…LISP. I have now closed the What are the best features ever added to AutoCAD? poll, and the winner is AutoLISP/Visual LISP, by a long, long way. I don’t always agree with the majority view expressed in the polls here, but in this case I wholeheartedly agree. Adding LISP was the biggest and best thing that ever happened to AutoCAD. Autodesk owes an enormous debt of gratitude to John Walker for incorporating the work of David Betz, who was of course standing on the shoulders of John McCarthy. It’s a crying shame that Autodesk has been so terribly neglectful of Visual LISP for over a decade.
Here are your top ten “best ever” AutoCAD features:
- AutoLISP / Visual LISP (32%)
- Paper / Model Space / Layouts (21%)
- Xrefs (20%)
- Copy / Paste between drawings (19%)
- Dynamic Blocks (16%)
- Object Snaps (15%)
- Layer Visibility per Viewport (12%)
- Undo (12%)
- Grips (12%)
- AutoSnap (9%)
Something interesting I noticed is the age of these features:
- AutoLISP / Visual LISP – 1985 (significantly improved 1999)
- Paper / Model Space / Layouts – 1990 (significantly improved 1999)
- Xrefs – 1990
- Copy / Paste between drawings – 1991
- Dynamic Blocks – 2005
- Object Snaps – 1984
- Layer Visibility per Viewport – 1990 (improved 2008)
- Undo – 1986
- Grips – 1992
- AutoSnap – 1992
The youngest feature here is 6 years old, the oldest is 27. The average top-ten AutoCAD feature is over 20 years old. What does that tell you?