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Rewriting Reddit (2005)

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Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)

#91

Post by danenania »

nrao123 wrote: post #88
keysersosa wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think that post dates from a time where you still heard people refer to them as "weblogs". Edit: Found it. It was the 14th post on our blog a time, but definitely light on the implementation details. http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html

Thanks for sharing this post! About this: ===If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented.=== If Clojure was available back then and if you had written it in Clojure instead of Lisp (and given…

Clojure is a beautiful language and its web ecosystem is improving rapidly, but breadth of, depth of, and support for libraries is still its main weakness next to the likes of rails and django. Clojure's a lot better for solving hard problems, but you'll also spend a lot more time getting tripped up by things that seem like they should be easy and reinventing wheels. Fortunately, it seems a near certainty that this will eventually no longer be true.

Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)

#93

Post by ryanfreeborn »

linuxydave wrote: post #74
nocman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When he said "Whatever happened to that Lisp clone?" I'm pretty sure he was referring to the part of the article that mentions the folks on comp.lang.lisp who were discussing writing a competitor to Reddit in Lisp. The discussion was not about writing a new Lisp or Lisp-like language, but a clone of Reddit. The fact that HN is a site that performs a function very similar to Reddit, and happens to be written in a dial…

>I'm pretty sure he was referring to the part of the article that mentions the folks on comp.lang.lisp who were discussing writing a competitor to Reddit in Lisp. Yep, spot-on. It's the same with those guys who wanted to make a Facebook clone focused on privacy or whatever. Lots of talk and then you never hear about the project again.

You mean Diaspora? (or maybe there's another clone I missed out on). The founder of Diaspora committed suicide. I think the project mostly died with him.

Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)

#94

Post by quasse »

pshc wrote: post #42

We currently use web.py + gevent to run our API where I work. It's really easy to work with since it's so tiny and simple, and since we only need JSON in and out for now, it's perfectly sufficient. Before web.py, we were on a scary Tornado implementation. The API was rewritten to web.py in a week with a minimal delta. We won't be on web.py forever, and gevent sometimes kicks up minor fusses, but I think web.py has gi…

I'm not very familiar with Tornado (we've switched to mostly Flask now) but I'd be interested to know what kinds of problems cropped up that lead you to switch to web.py

Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)

#95

Post by dangayle »

TylerE wrote: post #87
jedberg wrote: post #11

web.py never really worked well, so we ended up rewriting it again. The interesting thing was that Django still wasn't up to the task when we did that, mostly because it's templating engine was too slow. So we chose Pylons instead. It should be noted that Django has since fixed that issue.

Django templating is still pretty slow.... the last time I benchmarked it (maybe 6 months ago) it was a fairly large amount slower than Jinja2 (3-4x maybe?)

What's cool is that there is a legitimate push to make Jinja a first class citizen in Django, with other third party templating engines being available via a new API.

Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)

#96

Post by dangayle »

temuze wrote: post #27

The first Python web framework I used was Django. I'm really glad I came across it first because I was inexperienced at the time and it forced me to adopt a lot of good practices. However, now that I'm more experienced, I can relate a little to what Aaron is saying here. Learning all of this boilerplate stuff is annoying! Recently, I started contributing to a friend's rails app and I found the process of learning how…

I think a lot of that is in the presentation of the tutorials and the documentation. There's a book on Oreilly called "Lightweight Django" that strips away all of the absolute non-essential cruft of Django and starts from scratch, slowly adding pieces from the framework as it goes along. It shows you why you need each piece and why it goes where it goes.

Django doesn't need the magic, it's just annoyingly presented that way.

Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)

#97

Post by dbdr »

ryanfreeborn wrote: post #93
linuxydave wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm pretty sure he was referring to the part of the article that mentions the folks on comp.lang.lisp who were discussing writing a competitor to Reddit in Lisp. Yep, spot-on. It's the same with those guys who wanted to make a Facebook clone focused on privacy or whatever. Lots of talk and then you never hear about the project again.

You mean Diaspora? (or maybe there's another clone I missed out on). The founder of Diaspora committed suicide. I think the project mostly died with him.

Wow, I didn't know about this suicide :(

Is the project really dead though? I have no personal experience, but these stats show a growing number of active users: http://pods.jasonrobinson.me/

Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)

#98

Post by rmc »

nocman wrote: post #53
27182818284 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew HN was written in Arc, but I wasn't aware that it is the Lisp clone referred to by this piece. Was it?

When he said "Whatever happened to that Lisp clone?" I'm pretty sure he was referring to the part of the article that mentions the folks on comp.lang.lisp who were discussing writing a competitor to Reddit in Lisp. The discussion was not about writing a new Lisp or Lisp-like language, but a clone of Reddit. The fact that HN is a site that performs a function very similar to Reddit, and happens to be written in a dial…

The fact that HN is a site that performs a function very similar to Reddit, and happens to be written in a dialect of Lisp is completely coincidental :-D (unless there has been some comment by pg about his motivations for making HN that I missed, but I kind of doubt it).

I believe pg stated that HN was supposed to be what reddit was originally.

Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)

#99

Post by Spiritus »

TylerE wrote: post #87
jedberg wrote: post #11

web.py never really worked well, so we ended up rewriting it again. The interesting thing was that Django still wasn't up to the task when we did that, mostly because it's templating engine was too slow. So we chose Pylons instead. It should be noted that Django has since fixed that issue.

Django templating is still pretty slow.... the last time I benchmarked it (maybe 6 months ago) it was a fairly large amount slower than Jinja2 (3-4x maybe?)

Did you make sure to enable to cached template loader[1]?

>Enabling the cached template loader often improves performance drastically, as it avoids compiling each template every time it needs to be rendered.

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/api/#dja...

Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)

#100

Post by INTPenis »

_stem wrote: post #38

For all people still thinking that Django is not "lean" or flexible enough for their next project, let me just leave this here: https://speakerdeck.com/mstepniowski/django-best-python-micr... A single-file web application in Django: https://github.com/mstepniowski/microdjango/blob/master/poll...

>A single-file web application in Django: https://github.com/mstepniowski/microdjango/blob/master/poll....

That still looks very complicated compared to most microframeworks I've used, including web.py.

And all that django-specific logic that needs to be in there makes it harder to read unless you're familiar with the django ecosystem.

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