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Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

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Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#121

Post by antupis »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #105
coldtea wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never had any particular benefit to write your startup code in Lisp. That myth came from a few posts by a person who was a huge proponent of Lisp, in an era were web (front and backend) development was much easier, and web-related libraries were lacking in all languages (so it wasn't like Lisp's smaller popularity would hurt you there). It's an example of one. If they didn't get lucky and Yahoo! bought some other…

> Statistically speaking, 99.9% of succesful startups were written not in any Lisp, and 0.1% of them in Lisp. I think the point that PG was making wasn't that P(lisp|success) > P(blub|success) is what's key but that P(success|lisp) > P(success|blub) > What's more, Yahoo! even scrapped all their Lisp code soon after. I'm hardly a PG fanboy, but I have to say this is exactly what's expected in PG's original post on the…

I think that difference is that now every mainstream programming language is so good that there is not that much difference outside very specific niches. That was not case in 2003.

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#122

Post by jjwiseman »

A comment by Steve Huffman on my blog[1], from back when they switched away to Python:

  I didn't say the are *no* shoulders to stand on. There are
  just fewer.

  Without a doubt, Edi Weitz single-handedly made reddit
  possible. He's an army-of-one producing good Lisp
  libraries. The issues that made it really hard to stick
  with Lisp weren't particularily Lispy.

  The biggest trouble that plagued us was that we could never
  quite get Lisp reddit stable enough to sleep at night.
  There were weird threading issues that would bring the site
  to its knees a couple times a day and required constant
  monitoring.
Another comment, from Paul Graham:

  > One can argue that they betrayed the worth of a
  > philosophy merely for cheap money.

  Ye gods, enough with the conspiracy theories already. Y
  Combinator didn't know Reddit was going to use Lisp when
  we funded them. And the reason they switched (or at least,
  the last straw) was all too mundane: some thread bug in
  CMUCL that made the site keep crashing.
1. http://lemonodor.com/archives/001301.html

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#123

Post by qup »

scrollaway wrote: post #69
littlestymaar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not sure how to prove anything, but I’ll note that Python 3.0 was released in 2008. If Python 2 wasn’t already extremely popular and well-established at that point, I doubt we’d have seen the brutal 10+ish year migration from it. This is about the “scripting niche” I was talking about: in 2008 every Linux distro included Python and lots of build scripts were written in Python 2, but Python for the back-end was…

Yeah python for the backend started taking off with Django, which only released 1.0 and picked up steam in 2008.

Django was already very good well before 1.0, and had at a minimum some of the best documentation out there. I seem to recall a decent community, video tutorials, etc.

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#124

Post by vindarel »

avodonosov wrote: post #107
PawBer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd also have to find a copy of the web framework it uses because it got renamed and the author disabled the old download address.

The tbnl web server was indeed renamed to hunchentoot. I found the old tbnl versions in the wayback machine. One of the snapshots: https://web.archive.org/web/20080131152054/http://www.weitz.... Most likely adapting to the current hunchentoot would not be difficult too.

It has been done \o/ https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#125

Post by vindarel »

avodonosov wrote: post #9
allanrbo wrote: post #8

Would be fun to see what it takes to run it!

DB schema is missing. If there was an .sql script to create all the tables, I could run this reddit version. Most of the information about columns and tables could be recovered from data.lisp and view-defs.lisp. Maybe also old.lisp

Here's an updated fork with DB migrations: https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#126

Post by earthboundkid »

markdown wrote: post #46
winrid wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was chosen because at the time because python was much more mature and productive. They didnt use Django, but as an example Django is still more productive than any Node framework I've tried thus far, too, and we have types now. :)

Aaron Swartz replaced the Lisp with web.py

Yes, web.py was his baby. He also had some markdown parser stuff.

Baby boomers always tell me about seeing The Doors live in dive bar in NYC. I can say I used Reddit when it was written in Lisp. :-)

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#128

Post by lanstin »

pphysch wrote: post #112
varjag wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Python it doesn't take abuse. You blink and the bloody thing rots away.

Relative to what other language?

go lang

done a few services and CLIs and never had updating deps break anything unless you count newer linters complain about new things.

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#129

Post by vjust »

susam wrote: post #16

MathB.in, a simple pastebin for mathematical snippets, went in the opposite direction. It was first written in PHP and then later rewritten in Common Lisp. See https://susam.net/blog/mathbin-turns-ten.html for the full story.

I checked out MathB.in. Neat stuff!! I've started and stopped with the Lisp/Schema family several times. When other languages frustrate me, I go back to lisp for some therapy.
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