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Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

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Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#61

Post by littlestymaar »

wk_end wrote: post #53
littlestymaar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Ruby in 1995, but it wasn't before 2005 (and Rails) that it reached traction. In 2007, albeit 16 years old, Python was still far from mainstream, especially out of its scripting niche.

That doesn’t match my recollection. 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.

> 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 really rare back then.

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#62

Post by _8j50 »

wiseowise wrote: post #20
_8j50 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm...same reason as JS? Why do you think they need more speed to the point they need c++? Do you think finding c++ devs easier than python devs?

> Ummm...same reason as JS? Why do you think they need more speed to the point they need c++? Well, given complaints how much 3rd party apps cost them, they’d better off optimize their crap first.

It's not really about cost, it's about convincing investors CEO dude is in control and can make reddit profitable for their planned IPO. "We spent a shitton of money migrating to C++ and hiring expensive and harder to replace C++ talent to optimize shit" is not a good selling point.

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#63

Post by FpUser »

tmtvl wrote: post #42
FpUser wrote: post #39

>"written in Lisp" And why does that matter? Whatever turns one on.

It matters for the same reason that "X written in Rust" or "which companies are using Lisp?" matters: some people refuse to give Lisp a look unless every F500 company has at least 3 major projects written in it.

>"some people refuse to give Lisp a look"

Nothing is wrong with this. There are crapload of languages and very little benefit from a practical standpoint for a single person to use them all. They're just tools. Some are better, some are worse and some are highly specialized. What is being built is important, not how.

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#64

Post by marcinzm »

wudangmonk wrote: post #15

The current reddit seems to be written in js/python. I can see the logic behind js since its a lot easier to find devs and thanks to all the hard work of the engineers behind v8 its not a slow language. I do not understand why python was chosen though. If you need more speed you would go with c++ and not python which is the slowest popular language. Anyone got any insight into why python was chosen?.

In my experience one of the limiting factors of a language as you scale is library support. You want to do more complex things (for better or worse) or integrations (monitoring, etc.) but the development cost is very high since you have to write the whole part yourself or make tradeoffs on the limited libraries available.

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#65

Post by gnatman »

bitwize wrote: post #34
fnordsensei wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who’s been involved in both, it’s not like the language you pick doesn’t make a difference, but I’d say that there are other factors that vastly overshadow it. For example, one thing we were told when choosing to write in a lisp was that we’d have problems finding developers. It turned out to be true in that we received fewer applications, but compared to the same process with a more mainstream language, I…

Many of the most famous "done in Lisp" products I know of have the delightful feature that it's not Lisp itself that provides a solution that other languages can't . Rather: 1) Developers who like Lisp tend to be really smart, well-read, and well-educated. 2) Lisp streamlines these developers' thought processes, allowing them to get more done with less, fast. For example, the early Naughty Dog games written in GOOL/G…

I'm sure the commenter above has seen this but for anyone who hasn't: Andy Gavin talking about pushing the envelope of the Playstation for Crash Bandicoot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#66

Post by ijk »

jychang wrote: post #54
_ph_ wrote: post #49

Time flies. I still remember when there were quite some discussions in the communities when the initial reddit team made it public that they were switching from Lisp to Python for development. It created a lot of controversy, especially the specific reasons they named. I think quite some of them happened here on hacker news. Back then of course reddit was just a tiny startup as many. So it is funny to see this now po…

[flagged]

Funny coincidence, but Fortnite now has Verse, a scripting language that's pushing the envelope and using Haskell-influenced ideas to do distributed computation.

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#67

Post by wiseowise »

_8j50 wrote: post #62
wiseowise wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ummm...same reason as JS? Why do you think they need more speed to the point they need c++? Well, given complaints how much 3rd party apps cost them, they’d better off optimize their crap first.

It's not really about cost, it's about convincing investors CEO dude is in control and can make reddit profitable for their planned IPO. "We spent a shitton of money migrating to C++ and hiring expensive and harder to replace C++ talent to optimize shit" is not a good selling point.

I know what their plan is, just pointing out their hypocrisy.

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#69

Post by scrollaway »

littlestymaar wrote: post #61
wk_end wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t match my recollection. 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.

> 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.

Re: Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

#70

Post by nostrademons »

wk_end wrote: post #53
littlestymaar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Ruby in 1995, but it wasn't before 2005 (and Rails) that it reached traction. In 2007, albeit 16 years old, Python was still far from mainstream, especially out of its scripting niche.

That doesn’t match my recollection. 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.

It depends how you define "mainstream".

Python was definitely around, had a very strong community, and a number of very significant programs written in it. (Among them: the first versions of BitTorrent and Google.) However, if you were a random dev applying for a random job, you would most likely have to work in C++, Java, or C#. It was relatively difficult getting a job where you would write the majority of your code in Python. Certainly they existed, and many jobs would have you write small one-off scripts in Python, but the actual core product would usually be one of Java/C#/C++.

Remember that in 2009, Google had 20K employees while IBM (which was a major booster of Java) had 400K. And at Google, Python wasn't really allowed for major projects (Search had been rewritten from Python to C++ when it got big in 2000), so you'd be using Java or C++ anyway. Data science wasn't really a thing, and if you did machine learning you used frameworks like Weka or home-grown stuff.

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