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Sounds fun. The problem with elisp, though, is that it's (I am told) not a real Lisp. The info tutorial shipped with Emacs doesn't make me suspect otherwise. Perhaps a few neat elnode examples might help.
What is the definition of a real lisp? AFAIK lisp is just a family of computer languages. Elisp certainly isn't the most powerful or full featured but it still seems to have most of the characteristics.
Something that makes people fight over whether Scheme is a real lisp. Something that makes people fight over whether Dylan is a real lisp.
In short, there really isn't one. Unless you say that all real lisps adhere to the Common Lisp standard, which isn't, actually, a common position to find anyone taking in real life.
Lisp hacker to Lisp hacker, that is very cool. Really off topic but: it is great to be a programmer and write whatever we want for our side projects.
I really want to use this professionally. Lisp is so much more productive (for me at least) than other languages. I just don't want to have to use much else.
An Emacs web server existed over 10 years ago: http://synthcode.com/emacs/phase-0.2.1.tar.bz2 It has no doubt bit-rotted, but had some really nice features, like being able to automatically display any file as HTML with the exact same syntax highlighting that Emacs itself uses.
Most of them required other solutions for accepting the socket however and also failed to address concurrency.
Elnode, btw, does reuse Emacs' syntax highlighting code. Just try it out and see what it's like.
Given the optional lexical scoping of Emacs 24 (which elnode seems to use), I wonder what would be required to port something like this to a full-fledged CL system. Given some emulation of Emacs underpinnings, you could develop completely within Emacs and use that for smaller/local applications, but if you ever require more power, move it to e.g. SBCL and deploy...
I think you could scale with just Emacs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really want to use this professionally. Lisp is so much more productive (for me at least) than other languages. I just don't want to have to use much else.
Why Emacs Lisp and not a CL? SBCL actually performs on par with more popular languages for server workloads. Emacs Lisp? Not so much.
node.js has been over the performance grounds a lot, it's scalability that matters, not raw per request performance and for that Elnode could score.
Just a suggestion, but I think a video tutorial demonstrating the workflow advantages would be incredible for the visibility of the project. I, for one, would like to see how you envisioned elnode as a self-contained productive development and administration environment within emacs. edit: doh this is planned
Yes, as I said at the end, that's coming. Hopefully this week. It was important to get Elnode 0.9.9 out first.