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Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp
- nabla9 3y agoIt was announced in comp.lang.lisp most early adopters were lisp users. The first Reddit drama was when Paul Graham was caught having a sock puppet account to defend his arguments :)
- chimeracoder 3y ago> The first Reddit drama was when Paul Graham was caught having a sock puppet account to defend his arguments :) Do you have a link to this thread?
- jimsimmons 3y agowouldn’t surprise me if he has like 8 alt accounts here and on Twitter
- fuzztester 3y agoHow was he caught?
- newsoul 3y agoHere is the twitter thread about it: https://twitter.com/ShriramKMurthi/status/1669877506034266113?s=20 https://twitter.com/ShriramKMurthi/status/166987750603426611...
- esperent 3y agoThe source code is much more interesting than some Twitter bro's hot take. "We took a wrong turn w/ software." ... apparently. Save your energy and check out the repo instead. I don't totally blame the guy though. If you want to play the stupid Twitter game, you have to add a trite but provocative hot take to every post you make, lest your writings languish in obscurity. The only way to win is not to play, truly.
- defrost 3y agoTakes me back .. once upon a time I was an admin on old OG Freenode + #C + #lisp and recall when that was floated to take potshots at and use as a beta test crowd. The first non reddit team submissions were some very dry comp sci papers and tech manuals .. the cats came not long after.
- optbuild 3y agoHe is not a Twitter bro though. He has developed software extensively. He is a PL researcher, a professor at BrownU, now working in computing education.
- paganel 3y agoThanks for the link. Among other things it made be feel old, as in I have a post on my blog from back then writing about the Lisp to Python switch that Reddit was carrying out and it’s interesting to see computer programmers that look like they’re in their early 30s or such and not knowing about it at all. Those were more interesting and especially more vibrant times when it came to the web. Granted, the money was not as abundant as it is now.
- dotcoma 3y agoWhat language is HN written in ?
- bennyg 3y agoArc I believe.
- KerrAvon 3y agoOMG, Paul Graham actually released Arc in some form? I thought he never finished it. I was going to make snarky comment about how between spez and PG, Lisp must actually be extended-release brain poison for people in executive management positions; now I wonder if spez just knows PG personally and takes his advice.
- thatwasunusual 3y agoArc, which is a Lisp dialect. Too obscure and weird for me, but quite interesting. :)
- allanrbo 3y agohttps://github.com/wting/hackernews https://github.com/wting/hackernews
- allanrbo 3y agoWould be fun to see what it takes to run it!
- avodonosov 3y agoDB 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
- PawBer 3y agoYou'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.
- avodonosov 3y agoThe 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.de/tbnl/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080131152054/http://www.weitz.... Most likely adapting to the current hunchentoot would not be difficult too.
- vindarel 3y agoIt has been done \o/ https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/ https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/
- avodonosov 3y agoCool. So db schema is actually present, in the form of clsql clas definitions (the view-defs.lisp)
- vindarel 3y agoHere's an updated fork with DB migrations: https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/ https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/
- mchaver 3y agoSo I've read that they wrote it in Lisp at Paul Graham's request or to win favor. Does anyone know if writing your startup code in Lisp still has that benefit?
- fnordsensei 3y agoAs 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’d say the applicants were on average of higher quality. So by the final step, we were approximately considering the same number of résumés in both cases. But in the end, the language is not what has made the biggest impact. It’s been other, more universally applicable things, such as team dynamics and communication, clarity of vision and consistency in execution, process and planning, and a ton of other things where the particular language is not a factor.
- bitwize 3y agoMany 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/GOAL take clever advantage of asset data to produce effects close to the very edge of what the PlayStation/PlayStation 2 can do. No feature in these Lisp languages made this possible where C or C++ could not, but working in Lisp enabled the developers to iterate quickly, experiment, and arrive at interesting innovative solutions within the required time frame.
- gnatman 3y agoI'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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o
- wudangmonk 3y agoThe 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?.
- colordrops 3y agoI imagine because it's obviously "fast enough" performance-wise, and an order of magnitude faster dev-wise and hiring-wise.
- buildbot 3y agoNot fast enough to develop good moderation features with 2000 employees
- winrid 3y agoI would argue that's because they went the microservices + react route, so now everything is probably more difficult to implement, especially since the monolith is still in the center.
- littlestymaar 3y agoNot fast enough to keep their operational at bay though.
- _8j50 3y agoUmmm...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?
- wiseowise 3y ago> 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.
- susam 3y agoMathB.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 https://susam.net/blog/mathbin-turns-ten.html for the full story.
- prirai 3y agoI've tried mathb and it feels amazing and blazing fast. Perhaps the best way to go for typing in quick snippets and sharing with others.
- o1y32 3y agoI would argue that for such a small website (in the sense of both codebase size and traffic), which language is used does not matter, and is almost purely a personal preference.
- susam 3y agoYes, it was personal preference indeed. I have written a little more about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32980708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32980708
- vjust 3y agoI 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.
- FpUser 3y ago>"written in Lisp" And why does that matter? Whatever turns one on.
- tmtvl 3y agoIt 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.
- FpUser 3y ago>"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.
- hcks 3y ago[flagged]
- pinkcan 3y agolisp is from the 60s python is from 91
- _ph_ 3y agoTime 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 popping up as a news item. Shows, how long this is in the past and how much reddit has grown in size.
- omgmajk 3y agoI was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled on the Abuse source code a while ago and started reading through it, I've seen other people talk about it here but here's a link: https://github.com/videogamepreservation/abuse https://github.com/videogamepreservation/abuse
- tonetheman 3y ago[dead]
- choas 3y agoscraper.lisp contains parameters for a "delicious-scanner" to http://del.icio.us/popular/ http://del.icio.us/popular/ ... also something which is gone / replaced
- beached_whale 3y agoThe original del.icio.us was pretty good, it got weird later on.
- shakesbeard 3y agowow, now that's a website I haven't thought of in a while
- vindarel 3y agoHere's an updated version with DB tables (PostGres) that runs: https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/ https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/ Require: CommonLisp (tested on SBCL) PostgreSQL memcached smtp server CL-USER> (reddit:startup-reddit) #<HUNCHENTOOT:EASY-ACCEPTOR (host *, port 8000)> Writing a CL web app today is definitely doable. You won't find a framework with bells and whistles (yet), but all the required building blocks: web servers (Hunchentoot or Clack, like WSGI for Python), choice in templating engines (Djula is Django-like and I like it a lot), etc. To replace JS a maximum I use HTMX which is language and framework agnostic, life is beautiful. In the end, you can build a static binary with all the static assets, send it to your server and run it. - https://github.com/fukamachi/clack https://github.com/fukamachi/clack - https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html - https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#web-frameworks https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#web-frameworks
- Capricorn2481 3y agoHTMX is not anymore framework agnostic than JS. It's a JS library. You can use any backend with either.
- decross 3y agoHe meant that HTMX can work with a backend written in any language/framework. It doesn't constrain you to use any specific server-side tech.
- Capricorn2481 3y agoYes, that is the same with javascript.
- jjwiseman 3y agoA 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 http://lemonodor.com/archives/001301.html
- jeffrallen 3y ago> (defvar database-password "pgcwip42:") Hope they changed that password!
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