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I'm not at all familiar with Reddit's history, but a quick Google search tells me it was originally written in Lisp and then was rewritten in Python and is stil

I'm not at all familiar with Reddit's history, but a quick Google search tells me it was originally written in Lisp and then was rewritten in Python and is still Python to this day. I don't think Lisp web apps ever became mainstream, and Python web apps were definitely a wild west back then. The enterprise world was using ASP and Java and Cold Fusion.

jandrese 10y ago
It would be interesting to hear why they switched from Lisp to Python. Was it difficulty in finding qualified people when the company started to expand, or did they run into some other issue? Lisp proponents are always telling me how much better software would be if it were all written in Lisp, but it's really hard to find real world examples of it being used in production. It can't just be that most programmers are all just too dumb to understand the beauty of functional programming.
- lispm 10y ago
  http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html > 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. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand. > We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear. In most cases, the Lisp code translated very easily into Python. Lots of people have written web applications in Python, and there's plenty of code from which to learn. It's been fun so far, so we'll see where it takes us. > Regardless of Python, reddit was begging for a rewrite. Whether it was the best decision to do it all at once is up for debate, but I'm very pleased at the way it turned out.

jandrese 10y ago

It would be interesting to hear why they switched from Lisp to Python. Was it difficulty in finding qualified people when the company started to expand, or did they run into some other issue? Lisp proponents are always telling me how much better software would be if it were all written in Lisp, but it's really hard to find real world examples of it being used in production. It can't just be that most programmers are all just too dumb to understand the beauty of functional programming.

lispm 10y ago
http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html > 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. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand. > We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear. In most cases, the Lisp code translated very easily into Python. Lots of people have written web applications in Python, and there's plenty of code from which to learn. It's been fun so far, so we'll see where it takes us. > Regardless of Python, reddit was begging for a rewrite. Whether it was the best decision to do it all at once is up for debate, but I'm very pleased at the way it turned out.